


this is how we love

by nicole_writes



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Background Byleth/Dimitri, Background Mercedes/Dedue, Childhood Friends, Drama, F/M, Friends to Lovers to Exes to ????, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Please Read the Notes for Chapter Warnings, Post-Break Up, background felix/annette, folklore gave me a lot of feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:00:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 38,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25567075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicole_writes/pseuds/nicole_writes
Summary: Ingrid winces. “I’ve been busy,” she excuses lamely.Annette smiles tepidly, catching the lie but not calling her out. “We know,” she says instead. “Come on, you have to say hi to everyone.”- five years after the break-up, Ingrid and Sylvain come crashing back into each others' lives / modern au
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Ingrid Brandl Galatea & Sylvain Jose Gautier, Dorothea Arnault & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Dorothea Arnault & Sylvain Jose Gautier, Ingrid Brandl Galatea & Mercedes von Martritz, Ingrid Brandl Galatea/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 346
Kudos: 98





	1. track 1: in my defense, i have none

**Author's Note:**

  * For [livmoores](https://archiveofourown.org/users/livmoores/gifts).



> Hey, so I wasn't supposed to write this fic. Like for _months_ but eh, it's happening. I probably won't be updating it that regularly, just here and there when I get the motivation or need a break from my other long fic. 
> 
> Thanks for Ash for entertaining my brainstorming and to the rest of the sylvgrid discord for being the inspiring people that they are. 
> 
> Hopefully, these chapters won't get too long, but of course, that depends on if I can keep my shit together.
> 
> **Track 1: the 1**  
> 

_track 1: in my defense, i have none_

* * *

_present_

* * *

Ingrid turns the collar of her jacket up and buries her nose lower into her scarf. It is just like her to be away long enough to forget how cold it can get in November. She wiggles her fingers in her pockets to keep the circulation and bounces up on her toes. She can hear laughter and music on the other side of the door and she wishes someone would answer the door just so she doesn’t have to be cold anymore. 

Finally, after another painstaking minute, the house’s door swings open and Ingrid finds herself face-to-face with a beaming Annette. Ingrid barely gets a second to brace herself before her tiny redheaded friend is flinging herself out of the warmth of the house to throw her arms around Ingrid. Annette smells like flowers and wine and she’s already squealing as she squeezes Ingrid tightly. 

Ingrid winces for Annette’s bare feet on the freezing cold concrete as she pats her friend on the back. “Hi, Annette,” she greets awkwardly. 

Finally, Annette pulls away and seems to notice the chill, grabbing Ingrid by the sleeve of her coat and hauling her into the house. Annette clings to Ingrid as she closes the door behind them, still beaming. 

“I wasn’t sure you would make it!”

Ingrid smiles weakly and starts stripping out of her coat, already feeling the warmth from the house seeping into her veins. Annette notices and pulls open the coat closet, grabbing a hanger for her. Inside the closet, Ingrid sees a stylish brown peacoat which is probably Mercedes’s, a beat-up black army coat which can only be Byleth’s, a tailored black jacket which has to be Dimitri’s, a silver puffy coat which is probably Ashe’s, and a heavy grey jacket that looks like it would fit Dedue. 

Ingrid winds her scarf slowly around the top of the hanger, attaching it to her coat. She studies Annette. The redhead is still smiling brilliantly at her and there’s a healthy flush in her fair-skinned cheeks. 

“You look good, Annette,” Ingrid compliments. She glances down and spots the subject of the excitement: a glittering ring on Annette’s ring finger. She smiles softly. “It looks good on you,” she adds quietly. 

Annette’s infectious joy fizzles a little and she fiddles with the ring. “Thanks, Ingrid. We’re really happy you could be here. It’s been so long since anyone has seen you.”

Ingrid winces. “I’ve been busy,” she excuses lamely.

Annette smiles tepidly, catching the lie but not calling her out. “We know,” she says instead. “Come on, you have to say hi to everyone.”

Ingrid lets Annette pull her out of the front hall, kicking her boots off, and follows her friend into the living room. Mercedes and Dedue are seated on the loveseat together, laughing at something that Byleth who is sitting on Dimitri’s lap has said. Ingrid smiles before she realizes that she’s doing it. 

Dimitri spots her first and his face lights up, his eyes scrunching in the corners and his lips curling into a wide, beautiful smile. He doesn’t call out to her, but he does wave, and then Mercedes and Dedue are turning towards her. Byleth’s story cuts off short and she jumps out of Dimitri’s lap, crossing the room and pulling Ingrid into a tight hug.

Ingrid laughs and hugs her friend back. Byleth pulls away and puts a hand on Ingrid’s chin, tilting her head from side to side, studying her face. Ingrid laughs and pushes Byleth’s hand down. 

“Watch it,” she says. 

Byleth smiles warmly. “Sorry, but you can’t blame me for wanting to check. It’s been a long time, Ingrid.”

“Too long,” Ingrid agrees faintly. 

Mercedes hugs her next and somehow smells like cookies and cinnamon as she presses warm kisses to both of Ingrid’s cheeks. Then is Dedue who gives her a slightly stiff hug that’s perfectly in character for him and then Dimitri who wraps Ingrid up in a warm, familiar hug. Dimitri’s hug makes her eyes water immediately as she struck with a strong, undeniable sense of grief for all the time that she had missed. 

“It’s good to see you,” Dimitri says. 

_It’s nice to be seen_ , Ingrid almost says. “I missed you,” she says instead, patting her old friend on the back. 

He looks better than he did when she left. It’s Byleth’s influence, of course, but Dimitri looks years lighter than he did five years ago. His smile comes easily and freely and he seems comfortable and happy to be amongst friends. Dimitri’s gaze darts over her head towards the kitchen and Ingrid starts to turn, curious. 

She hears him before she sees him. 

Every muscle in her body tenses and her flight instinct kicks in and the only reason she doesn’t bolt is that Annette has linked their arms together so she has nowhere to go. Ingrid bites her tongue so hard that she’s surprised she doesn’t bleed. The warm, friendly atmosphere in the room drops a few degrees as the rest of her old friends join the party. 

First is Ashe who looks even taller than when she last saw him, but just as young and sweet with a smattering of freckles and joyous green eyes. Then it’s Felix with amber eyes clouded in amusement and his long navy hair pulled into a messy but at the top of his head. 

And then there’s Sylvain. 

Ingrid gently tugs her arm out of Annette’s grip and thankfully Annette doesn’t seem to notice as she heads over to Felix, leaning up to kiss her fiancé lightly. Ingrid can’t hear what Annette says, but Felix’s attention immediately fixes onto her and one of his eyebrows ticks up when he realizes that it’s really her standing in his living room. 

Of course, Sylvain sees her then. If Ingrid didn’t know him like she does, she probably would have missed the sheer panic that flashes through his eyes when he sees her. She sees the tension in his shoulder and the way his weight shifts onto the balls of his feet like he too is considering bolting away from her. 

Ingrid exhales slowly and approaches. “Hi Felix,” she greets. 

Felix nods to her. “Ingrid.” He doesn’t hug her. He’d never been one for physical affection. Annette is obviously his exception to that rule. 

“Hey!” Ashe says brightly, stepping closer to her. 

Ingrid laughs, taking him in. “You really didn’t stop growing did you?”

Ashe just laughs right back and opens his arms for a hug. Ingrid hugs him tightly. She has always liked Ashe. They had been close friends for a few years, but then their lives took them in different directions. Ashe steps away after their hug and drifts off towards Mercedes, leaving Ingrid to face down Sylvain who still looks interested in bolting. 

“Sylvain,” she says politely. 

He smiles at her. It’s his politician’s smile: the one he puts on for clients and cameras. She’s disappointed to see it, but she isn’t surprised. “Ingrid,” he greets in return. His eyes flicker down over her figure quickly and his smile twitches. “You look good.”

So does he. He’s wearing a dark grey button-up rolled up to his elbows with the top button popped and a pair of dark jeans. His socks are red and grey and dotted with dinosaurs. His hair is touseled and it looks like his eyes are creased from smiling a lot. He looks good and Ingrid leans away from him subtly. 

“Been a while,” she notes casually. 

“Yeah,” Sylvain agrees. 

“Come on, Ingrid, there’s more people in the kitchen,” Annette says, grabbing her hand and pulling her right past Felix and Sylvain into the kitchen. 

Sure enough, there are more people in the kitchen: Caspar and Linhardt and Lysithea and Claude and Hilda. They’re all Annette’s friends, not Felix’s, but Ingrid isn’t surprised. Leonie was probably working and Felix wasn’t likely to invite his ex-girlfriend to his engagement party. Caspar sees Ingrid first and he gives her a wide smile. 

“Hey! The prodigal gal returns home!” 

Linhardt waves to her lazily, yawning as he does. Lysithea takes the interruption as an opportunity to grab Annette’s arm and disengage from whatever argument she had been having with Claude. Hilda smiles at Ingrid too, wiggling her fingers in greeting. 

Claude smiles at her. “Traffic wasn’t too bad for you?”

Ingrid resists the urge to roll her eyes. She doesn’t need to give him more ammunition. “Shut it. It’s good to see you all.”

Hilda grabs Claude by the arm and drags him past Ingrid towards the living room. “Welcome back,” she says as she drifts past them. 

Ingrid turns and sees that Sylvain is standing in the doorway of the kitchen watching her interact with the others. Linhardt yawns loudly behind her and she steals a glance back to see that he and Caspar have settled around the kitchen table. She looks back at Sylvain who is still watching her and he glances out the other side of the kitchen to an open door of what looks like a bathroom. 

It’s almost disappointing how easily she reads his request. She heads for the bathroom and hears him follow her. She pushes open the door and steps to the far side of the room, leaving room for a second person. After a second, the door wiggles and he steps around it. His hand hovers on the handle and Ingrid waves him off. He closes the door behind him and the sound of the party fades to background noise. 

“I didn’t know you’d be here,” Sylvain says immediately. “Felix didn’t tell me.”

Ingrid sighs. “Well, that’s because I wasn’t supposed to be here. I couldn’t get work off originally.”

He nods. “Right. Well, how’ve you been?”

She rolls her eyes. “Come on, this is every bad post-breakup conversation rolled into one, Sylvain. We don’t need to have this conversation.”

He frowns. “I guess we don’t. I kind of thought we might be ready to have it though.”

“At Felix and Annette’s engagement party?” She shakes her head. “I don’t want to get into anything here.”

“Never said we had to,” he counters. “We could just catch up. Like friends.”

Ingrid studies his face. He seems honest enough, and she shifts her weight, resting her hip against the counter. “How was Sreng?” she asks. 

His eyebrow raises like he hadn’t expected her to actually go along with it, but he smooths it over quickly. “Good,” he replies. “Treaty is coming along better than it probably should. My dad’s a tough bastard, after all.”

Ingrid presses her lips together. She had known he was still working for his father, but some desperate part of her had hoped that he wasn’t. “Right,” she says. “I saw in the news. Congratulations.”

“How’s Daphnel?” he asks. 

Ingrid plucks at a thread on the sleeve of her dress and considers her words carefully. “It’s good,” she says lamely. “Research is going well and I’ve got a faculty position lined up for next year.”

Sylvain looks surprised at that. “Faculty? Already?”

She crosses her arms. “Problem?” 

Her tone of voice catches them both off-guard. Sylvain leans towards her instinctually and Ingrid leans back, her mind shooting her straight back when she was nineteen years old. Sylvain catches himself and redirects, moving to lean against the wall so that there is more space between them. 

“I just thought you were trying to focus on research for a while,” Sylvain says. 

Ingrid presses her lips together. When she last saw him, that had been true. But things had changed recently. Teaching was growing on her. “Plans change,” she says simply. 

Again, the words make her think of a time where the two of them might have hidden from the party in a bathroom for totally different reasons. Her throat tightens and she drops her eyes away from Sylvain. Her stomach twists and she suddenly wishes that she had just turned down the vacation time her boss had afforded her. She should have just stayed in Daphnel to work on her project proposal. 

It’s not even as if she can leave the conversation because Sylvain is cleanly positioned between her and the exit. 

Dimitri saves her when they both hear him calling for Ingrid from the other room, obviously looking for her. Sylvain straightens up and Ingrid takes a deep breath, walking past him towards the door to the bathroom. She gets her hand on the door handle just as he grabs her elbow lightly. 

She looks at him. “What?”

“How long are you in town?”

She takes in the composed but sincere expression on his face. Half of her is screaming to run as far away as possible and that Sylvain is _bad news as always_ , but the other half feels bad. She’s changed plenty since they last saw each other. Ingrid plucks his hand off her arm and drops it immediately. 

She opens the bathroom door and the party noise floods back to her senses, reminding her of her surroundings. She pokes her head out of the bathroom and catches sight of Mercedes who seems to be looking for her as she turns and calls out to the rest of the living room that she had found Ingrid. 

Ingrid steals one last look back at Sylvain. “I’ll call you,” she says simply and steps out of the bathroom.


	2. track 2: when you are young, they assume you know nothing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“You still haven’t told me how long you’re in town,” Sylvain says next, placing his cup down. He swipes his thumb along his bottom lip briefly and Ingrid’s eyes follow it against her will._
> 
> _“Yeah,” she mumbles. “Well, I was told to take my vacation time, but I think I may head back to Daphnel sooner rather than later.”_
> 
> \- Ingrid makes some calls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter is still short. That's good. It's not good that it's eating my brain when I'm trying to work though... Anyway, it's here and I'm going to jump back to work after this~
> 
>   
>  **Track 2: cardigan**  
> 

_track 2: when you are young, they assume you know nothing_

* * *

_present_

* * *

The windows on the inside of the coffee shop are fogged up. Her view of the street is blocked from the chair she sits in so she fidgets awkwardly, spinning her cup on the saucer she’s holding. She’s already drunk half of her coffee and there’s no sign of Sylvain yet. Her phone is sitting face-up on the table in front of her, but he hasn’t called or texted. 

Ingrid has always been on time for everything. Sylvain has always been late. This has been true for as long as she has known Sylvain and it irritates her just as much now as it did back then. 

The bell above the door chimes and Ingrid twists her head, looking over her shoulder. Standing in the doorway of the shop wearing a slim fitting, designer black winter coat is Sylvain. He’s smiling at someone standing just outside the coffee shop. Ingrid leans back over the back of her chair and catches the barest glimpse of a young woman with light blue hair and a shy, beautiful smile who is also looking at Sylvain. 

Something ugly curls in her stomach and she quickly turns around, picking up her coffee again. She holds it close to her face so that the wafts of steam off the top tingle against her cheeks and nose but she doesn’t drink from it. She hears the door to the coffee shop close and she can’t help the tension that builds in her shoulders as she waits, not bothering to turn around and look at Sylvain. 

He spots her because of course he does, and soon enough he steps around her and drops his coat over the back of the chair across the table from her. Sylvain doesn’t sit, immediately stepping away to the register to order himself a drink. Ingrid watches him, taking a small sip from her mug. 

He leans on the counter towards the barista, flashing his million-dollar smile and Ingrid’s stomach twisted. Of course he’s still like that. The girl outside the coffee shop is probably the girlfriend who doesn’t know a thing about how Sylvain acts around everyone. She bites the inside of her lip and looks away from Sylvain. 

It doesn’t take long for him to rejoin her, this time holding a takeout cup of what she assumes is a dark coffee. He settles into the seat across from her and places his cup down on the table, removing the lid to let it cool. Ingrid blinks as she sees the teabag bobbing in the scalding water. It certainly isn’t what she was expecting. 

“I’m seeing someone,” Sylvain says suddenly. 

Ingrid bites her tongue. With the pretty girl that seems to have walked him to a meeting with his ex, she could have guessed as much. She sips from her mug again, considering how she wants to respond to him. She’s not quite sure what the appropriate response would be at this point.

“What’s her name?” Ingrid asks quietly. 

Sylvain’s brow furrows and then realization dawns on him. “Oh, no, Ingrid. Her name is Dr. Voltovi.” He chuckles lightly. “You really think I’d walk up here and have the first words out of my mouth be about a new girlfriend?”

Ingrid frowns, feeling her cheeks heat up. “I don’t know,” she admits. She doesn’t. She hasn’t seen Sylvain in five years. She has no idea what she was expecting from him today. 

She certainly didn’t expect him to openly admit to seeing a therapist. Five years ago, they wouldn’t have ever had this conversation. But now? He had admitted it openly. She places her cup down and awkwardly taps her fingers against the top of the table between them. 

“I don’t know why I called you,” she says after a moment. 

Sylvain stirs his tea bag around the rim of his cup. “It probably has something to do with the fact that we did used to be friends.” 

It stings to hear the words “used to be”. But, it’s true. It’s been five years since she’s seen him and she has no right to call him a friend after all of that. 

“Probably,” she agrees softly. “I’ll probably have to come around for Felix and Annette a bit more often soon. Maybe it’s good that we can actually be in the same room again.”

Sylvain’s gaze softens. “Ingrid, it’s been five years. Can we put it behind us?”

Her throat tightens because she wants to say yes. She wants to have Sylvain, her best friend, back, but she’s not sure if she can. She still hears the words said echoing through her ears loud enough that it hurts. She closes her eyes as her ears ring dully. 

_No_ , she thinks desperately. _It’s been five years and I can’t let go of all the bullshit that sent us up in flames._

“Sure,” she says, her voice burning around the word. “It’s probably about time.”

His eyes darken with what looks almost like disappointment and he lifts his paper cup to his lips, taking a small sip. It’s just like him to get a to-go cup, she realizes. It’s an easy exit route for him if things had really gone wrong between them. It used to be her thing, running away from problems. 

“You still haven’t told me how long you’re in town,” Sylvain says next, placing his cup down. He swipes his thumb along his bottom lip briefly and Ingrid’s eyes follow it against her will. 

“Yeah,” she mumbles. “Well, I was told to take my vacation time, but I think I may head back to Daphnel sooner rather than later.” 

Sylvain hums. “Can’t even stick around for Dimitri’s birthday? He’d probably love to have you there.”

Dimitri’s birthday is over a month from now. Ingrid technically has enough vacation time to take that much time off because she is, in her boss’s words, absolutely a workaholic who needs to take more breaks instead of pushing it all to the end of the year every time. Even if she goes back to Daphnel, she’d probably get locked out of the lab and stuck in her apartment. 

“No,” Ingrid lies. She takes a sip of her coffee and the bitterness stings her tongue. “Got some deadlines coming up.” Technically her lab has a project proposal coming up, but one phone call to her boss had had her removed from the project so that she would take a damn break. 

He clicks his tongue, looking unsurprised. “Right, the anguish of academic deadlines.”

“I didn’t know you were back in Fhirdiad,” Ingrid says next. “Thought you were up north still.”

The corner of his mouth tilts up. “I get vacation time too, being a government employee and all.”

She sips her coffee again. It’s almost cold. Her mind shoots back to the sweet-looking blue-haired girl who had been with Sylvain when he had arrived. She sips her drink and swallows past the bitterness rising in her throat. 

“Have you talked to Dorothea?” she asks next. “She hasn’t answered any of my calls.”

Sylvain’s mouth ticks down. “I’ll send you her new number. She got it changed a year or so back thanks to some stalker at the performance house. Though, Ingrid,” he trails off and she frowns, picking up his unsaid point. 

She sighs. “How mad is she going to be?”

Sylvain shakes his head. “No idea. You know how unpredictable she can be.”

“Have she and Felix talked at all?”

“Not since he got back together with Annette, I don’t think,” Sylvain says. 

Ingrid bites her lip. “Right,” she mumbles. 

She drums her fingers over the top of the table. Sylvain’s knee bounces idly. They didn’t used to be like this. They use to fill every silence with jokes or easy comments to catch up on gossip and current events. Then, later, they filled conversations with barbed words and short-tempered arguments. 

_Do you think we’ll ever be friends again?_ she wants to say. _Do you still hate me for what I said to you? Would you listen to me if I told you the truth?_

She doesn’t say anything. She drains the rest of her drink and the saucer clinks as she places the empty cup down. Sylvain caps his to-go cup to keep the steam in now that it has cooled to a satisfactory temperature. 

“I didn’t know you drank tea,” she says. “Has Dimitri finally gotten to you?”

Sylvain chuckles. “Would you believe me if I said it wasn’t his influence? Of all people, it’s Lorenz who has actually given me a damn appreciation for a few blends. Plus, the blend is supposed to be calming.”

He tilts the tea bag tag towards her and she reads the blend. She exhales shakily. Of course he’s drinking chamomile. It had been the only tea she used to keep in their apartment. Mostly it had only been drunk by Dimitri when he was visiting, but it was her favourite blend when she needed something decaffeinated. 

_Since when do you hang out with Lorenz? Who was the girl who you arrived with today? How many notches have you added to your bedpost since I left?_

The questions spin through her mind and Ingrid tears her eyes off Sylvain’s, looking out the fogged-up window. It doesn’t quite look like it’s raining, but it’s hard to tell through the foggy window. She had checked the weather in Daphnel when she had woken up this morning. It was sunny there, as it always seemed to be, but Fhirdiad is Fhirdiad. November here is already winter. It could start to snow any day. 

Her phone buzzes on the table between them and they both look at it. Her screen is lit up with a text and she can’t reach out to turn it over fast enough. Her hand shakes as she slides the phone across the table and into her bag, away from Sylvain’s curious gaze. 

He doesn’t comment on the name on the screen even though she knows he saw it. He sips his tea and leans back in his chair, studying her curiously. 

“Miklan had a parole hearing a couple of months ago.”

“I heard,” she says because she did. Felix had called her and told her to get her ass back to town for it. She hadn’t. 

“I went on the stand and told the judge that he was a menace,” Sylvain mumbles bitterly. She watches as he subconsciously rubs the inside of his right wrist where she knows there is a scar. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. She is. 

“I’m not,” Sylvain says. 

_Do you hate me as much as you hate him?_ she thinks desperately. “Can you send me Dorothea’s number? I should probably call her since I’m not in town that long. She’ll never forgive me if I don’t,” she says instead. 

Sylvain nods. He pulls out his phone and taps out a message to her, sharing Dorothea’s contact information. Ingrid slides her phone back out of her bag and saves Dorothea’s new number over her old one. She almost texts her, but she knows that is the wrong way to handle Dorothea. 

Ingrid pushes her empty cup to the middle of the table. “It’s good to see you, Sylvain,” she says softly. 

She stands up, reaching for the beat-up brown winter coat draped on the back of her chair. She pulls it on and then winds her bright blue scarf around her neck so that it hides the lower half of her face. She fiddles with the sleeve of her coat as Sylvain stands up across from her. He doesn’t make a move to put on his own coat so Ingrid just nods and turns away from him. 

“Don’t be a stranger,” he calls to her as she pushes open the door and steps out into the cold. 

Ingrid pulls out her phone and looks at the unread text still blinking on her screen. 

[Need a rescue?]

She dials the number instead of replying. She doesn’t even let him say hello before she starts speaking. “Can you get Judith off my back? I need to get out of here.”

“ _Hello to you as well, Ingrid,_ ” Claude replies. “ _I’m guessing your meeting with Sylvain was not a success then._ ”

“Shut up,” she replies. “I need to go back to Daphnel. Can you do something about Judith or not?”

“ _I’m with her on this one, Ingrid. You’ve been gone for a long time. Take your vacation time. Spend it with your friends. Everyone was happy to see you the other night you know._ ”

She frowns. “Goodbye, Claude,” she grumbles and hangs up on him. 

She starts the walk back to her hotel. It’s a twenty-minute walk that would be reduced by fifteen if she took the subway, but she really doesn’t want to think about the Fhirdiad Underground right now. Instead, she opens her contacts and dials Dorothea’s new number. 

It rings three times before Dorothea picks up. 

“ _Hello? I don’t recognize this number,_ ” her friend says politely. 

Ingrid swallows a lump in her throat. “Hey, Dorothea, it’s Ingrid.”

The line goes dead immediately. Ingrid pulls the phone away from her face and stares at the call log in surprise. She had been expecting some kind of reaction, but she hadn’t expected to get hung up on immediately. She’s about to call back when her phone vibrates with a call of its own. Ingrid answers. 

“ _Fuck you, Ingrid Galatea,_ ” Dorothea snaps. “ _You disappear for five years and just call me out of the blue? Fuck you_.”

“Thea,” Ingrid pleads, “you know why I left.”

A pause. “ _I do._ _I hate you for it, but I know why you did it_. _How’d you even get my number_?”

“Sylvain.”

“ _Oh shit. You talked to him_?”

“Yes. It was hard to avoid him.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Dorothea replies. “ _I know what you were doing on Friday_.”

“Yeah.” Ingrid tucks her free hand into her pocket and takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry I never called.”

“ _I get it, Ingrid. As much as I would love to hang up on you again, I have missed you_.”

Ingrid laughs breathily, feeling warm tears well in her eyes suddenly. “I missed you too.”

“ _So you’re in Fhirdiad? How long?_ ”

She cradles the phone against her face as she darts across a busy crosswalk, barely dodging a pedestrian going in the other direction. “Until Judith unbars me from the lab for not taking my vacation hours.”

“ _If I know you at all, that probably means you’re here until the new year._ ”

Ingrid laughs faintly. “I think I might be. I’ll probably head back to Daphnel though, even if I can’t work.” Her throat tightened. “It’s expensive to be here.”

“ _Where are you staying_?”

“The Hurley, downtown.”

“ _For a month? Honey, you’ll break your bank after a week. I have a spare room in my apartment. I’ll meet you at the Hurley in two hours._ ”

Dorothea doesn’t let her argue, hanging up the call before she can. Ingrid stares at the phone. She has barely spoken to Dorothea in the five years she has been gone, but she seems to be the same as always. Ingrid reasons that she has probably picked up a few of her bad habits again like bouncing between dates. 

Ingrid looks up at the building that looms above her and stops in her tracks. The Blaiddyd Enterprises' main office looms above her and Ingrid remembers the first time she came to this building back when she was young and stupid and in love. It had all seemed so easy back then. How stupid she was to believe that. 

She’s pretty sure she burned the picture of the five of them crowded around Dimitri’s desk. It had been one of the things she had offered to the bonfire after their numbers went from five to four. 

Ingrid shakes her head and keeps walking. She has to get to the hotel before Dorothea does to get her shit together.


	3. track 3: i had a marvellous time ruining everything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“_ Uh, no. I’m in Enbarr all week. What’s going on _?” Hilda sounds less annoyed as soon as she hears his voice and Sylvain sighs heavily._
> 
> _“Miklan,” Sylvain mutters._
> 
> \- Sylvain has an accident and then an argument.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, I guess I'm coming out and say that this fic is a direct response to emiwaka29's fic, Champagne, Wine, and Vodka which attacks my sylvgrid heart so I wrote this to attack my twinnie's heart. because she deserves it. 
> 
> anyways, this song was one of the trickiest ones on the album to come up with a premise for, but the lyric fits well so I made it work. 
> 
> cheers to the sylvgrid discord, as always, and if you'd like to come join us and yell at me (or emi, because we always encourage yelling at emi) -> https://discord.gg/NTzFVSK
> 
> heads up that the m rating comes into play a bit here with some post-violence injuries and discussion of.
> 
>   
>  **Track 3: the last great american dynasty**  
> 

_track 3: i had a marvellous time ruining everything_

* * *

_six years ago_

* * *

Sylvain leans his head back against the wall and breathes out slowly. His vision is blurry in his left eye and by the headache pounding in his skull, he knows that he probably shouldn’t try to get behind the wheel of a car in his current state. He rubs his jaw blankly before he fishes his phone out of his pocket. 

The screen is cracked and he can barely read the time through his messed up left eye. It’s late. It’s way too late for him to reasonably call half the people on his contacts list which means he’s down to three options: Byleth, who would immediately call Dimitri which he doesn’t want, Hilda, who would probably come to get his pathetic ass, or Ingrid. 

Sylvain dials Hilda’s number and fumbles with his phone until he gets it on speakerphone. He tilts his head back as the phone rings and closes his eyes. 

“ _I_ _t’s two in the morning you fuck, what do you want?_ ” Hilda whines immediately. 

“Any chance you’re in Fhirdiad?”

“ _Uh, no. I’m in Enbarr all week. What’s going on?_ ” Hilda sounds less annoyed as soon as she hears his voice and Sylvain sighs heavily. 

“Miklan,” Sylvain mutters.

“ _Fuck. Where are you? How bad is it?_ ”

Sylvain touches his head. He’s got a seriously swollen left eye and a bit of blood in his hairline. He touches his chest and winces at the twinge of pain. That kind of pain probably means at least one broken or cracked ribs.

“Bad,” he admits. “I’m at work, well, kind of. I’m in the alley.”

“ _You’re sitting on your injured ass in an alley downtown and you’re calling me? What the fuck, Sylvain! Call yourself a damn ambulance._ ”

“No,” he says. “Too many questions.”

“ _Fuck you, Sylvain. If you won’t call an ambulance, I’m calling Mercedes._ ”

“Hilda, no. She’s probably asleep.”

Hilda snorts over the phone. “ _Yeah, and you’ll probably be dead if I don’t. Send me your location so that I can send it to her._ ”

Sylvain grunts. “Fine, you bitch.”

“ _Whatever._ ”

She hangs up on him and Sylvain awkwardly holds his phone up to the right side of his face as he fumbles through his location settings, turning his location sharing on with Hilda. She sends him three heart emojis in a text as a reply and Sylvain just sighs, dropping his arm into his lap. 

He doesn’t really know how long he waits in the dark alley by himself. He closes his eyes and breathes slowly and shallowly, trying to compensate for the pain in his chest, but it doesn’t do much to help with the twinges of pain that flare up. After some amount of time, there is a yellow-white light that washes over him and he cracks his right eye open. 

At the end of the alley, Mercedes shines a flashlight in his direction, looking absolutely horrified. “Sylvain!” she cries and rushes towards him. 

A blurry blob approaches next to her and it takes Sylvain right up until Mercedes and the blob are leaning over him to recognize Dedue. He cracks a grin at his two friends, tilting his face towards them so that they can admire the shiner blooming over his eye. 

“Hey,” he says lightly. 

Dedue is frowning. Mercedes kneels next to him and places her flashlight down so that it’s shining upwards, giving her a strange glow. Mercedes takes his face in her hands and tilts it slowly left and right, evaluating him. Her expression is flat, but Sylvain picks up on the worry in her gaze. 

“I’m okay,” he says, but his words slur and come out quieter than he had intended. 

“Dedue,” Mercedes says, turning away from Sylvain. “Call an ambulance, please. I don’t know how badly he’s hurt.”

“We should call Ingrid afterwards,” Dedue says, his voice quiet. 

Sylvain grabs Mercedes’s wrist. “You can’t call Ingrid,” he pleads. 

She looks upset with him now. “Sylvain,” she tries to argue. 

He shakes his head, ignoring the stars that dot his vision with the motion. “Don’t call her.”

“Felix, then,” Dedue said, staring down Sylvain and daring him to argue.

Sylvain’s shoulders slump. Felix is better than Ingrid, but not by much. Felix has been dealing with enough shit on his own. He doesn’t need this bullshit on top of everything else, but Sylvain knows that Dedue and Mercedes aren’t going to take no for an answer. It doesn’t take long until he hears the siren. Sylvain closes his eyes against the bright, flashing red and white lights and thinks about the fact that Felix is going to kill him. 

Someone touches his shoulder and he opens his eyes to look into the face of a paramedic who looks concerned. The woman asks him something, but Sylvain’s head is starting to hurt so he just grunts and shuts his eyes open. There’s a bit of yelling in the background, but the words sound like they’re being pressed through cotton to reach his ears. He keeps his eyes closed.

* * *

The next time he opens his eyes, he’s lying in a hospital bed staring at the fluorescent light above his bed. He has a bandage over his left eye, completely blocking his vision, and he can feel bandages wrapped around his chest and his right leg. Sylvain lolls his head to the right, keeping it back against the pillow. 

There’s a chair next to his bedside and his dirty black jacket is draped over the back of it. There is also a black messenger bag with a silver keychain of a horseshoe in the chair, instead of a person, and Sylvain closes his eyes, groaning to himself. Here he had been hoping that it wouldn’t come to this. 

He lays flat against the bed, staring at the ceiling, as he pictures all the things that Ingrid is going to say to him this time. He’s not sure how many of his stupid excuses he’ll be able to spit. Maybe he can say he had been jumped when he stopped for a smoke before heading home. 

The door to his hospital room squeaks as it opens and Sylvain has to twist his head almost 90 degrees to the left to see the door with his right eye. He immediately looks away as Ingrid pauses in the doorway, her hair pulled up into a loose bun. She’s wearing a pair of his sweatpants and an old softball t-shirt that she normally wears to sleep. Ordinarily, she would have looked adorable, but she’s just about the last person that Sylvain wants to have to deal with him. 

She doesn’t say anything as she walks around the hospital bed and sits in the chair where her bag was resting. She leans forward so she can brace her elbows against the cot. “Hi,” she says quietly. 

“Who called you?” 

“Felix,” Ingrid replies. She sounds frustrated. He had known she would be. 

“Oh,” he replies. It makes sense that Felix called her. Sylvain knows he should have called her, but he didn’t, so now he has to deal with that fact. 

“Why did I have to hear from Felix that my boyfriend had been hospitalized?” She reaches for his hand and he tugs it out of her reach, frowning. 

“Didn’t want you to worry.”

She fixes him with her Ingrid Galatea special: an unamused frown and narrowed green eyes. It’s the picture of irritation. “Were you going to tell me the rest of it?”

His heart skips a beat. She doesn’t know anything else. There’s no way that she knows anything else. 

“What’s the rest of it?” he asks, playing dumb. 

Ingrid’s eyes flood with disappointment and she leans away from him, dropping her hands back into her own lap. “Felix wasn’t the only one who called me. Hilda called too. She wanted to make sure that you hadn’t been mauled to death by a dog in an alleyway.”

“Fuck,” Sylvain muttered under his breath. 

“Why would you agree to meet him? Sylvain, you of all people should know how dangerous your brother is,” she continues, still lecturing him. 

He pauses, absorbing her words. “How did you know that I agreed to meet him?” he asked, suspicion creeping into his tone. Ingrid’s lips flatten and her eyes betray her guilt. Sylvain huffs. “You went through my phone.”

“Hilda called me saying that your brother was the one who sent you here, so yeah, Sylvain, I went through your phone,” she says defensively. She folds her arms. “Why would you agree to meet him?” 

“He’s my brother, Ingrid,” Sylvain grumbles. 

She frowns. “Don’t make excuses to me.” She stands up from the chair. “I’m going for a walk.”

She heads for the entrance of the room, but she does leave her bag behind which to Sylvain is a good sign. It means that she does intend to come back eventually, even if she needs to cool off first. He doesn’t watch her leave, but he hears the door shut behind her. He twists back towards the seat that his girlfriend had previously occupied and spots his phone, wallet, and keys resting on the bedside table. 

He picks up his phone and pulls up his text conversation with Miklan. He sighs after skimming the messages and closes out of the conversation. He notices that he has twelve texts from Hilda, four from Claude, two from Leonie, nine from Byleth, one from Dimitri, and thirty from Dorothea. Sylvain groans under his breath and shuts his phone completely off. He doesn’t have the energy to deal with replying to those messages right now. 

The door opens again and Sylvain twists, turning just as Felix lets himself into the room. His friend’s expression is stone cold and Sylvain drops back against the pillows, wincing at the pain that flashes in his chest. 

“Are you here to chew me out too?” he asks. 

Felix glares at him. “I’m here to tell you that you’re a fucking idiot. I’m sure you already knew that though.”

Sylvain winces. “Felix, why are you taking her side?”

He scowls, folding his arms. “Because, the way that she tells it, you were the one who not only agreed to meet Miklan, but you agreed to meet him alone in an isolated location like an absolute idiot.”

“He told me he needed a thousand bucks to pay off some bookie that was after him,” Sylvain says quietly. “Told me I’d never have to hear from him ever again if I gave it to him.”

Felix sighs. “Sylvain, your brother has tried to kill you seven times. Tonight isn’t even the closest he’s come to doing that.”

Sylvain studies Felix out of his good eye. There’s something hard and uncompromising about the way that his friend is looking at him. It doesn’t take him long to figure out why. Sylvain groans and brings a hand up to scrub at his face where the bandage isn’t covering. 

“Why the fuck would you call my father?”

“Because you need to do something about your brother. And you need to stop fucking lying to all of us about it. You’re an idiot, Sylvain, but you’re not a fool,” Felix snaps. Felix’s gaze drifts to the visitor’s chair where Ingrid’s bag is sitting. His jaw sets. “And whatever is going on with you two, you should fix it.”

Sylvain blinks. Whatever is going on between him and Ingrid? As far as he’s aware, Ingrid is his girlfriend and roommate. They argue, sure, but everyone does. He stares at Felix, trying to read his friend, but Felix’s expression is closed and cold. 

Sylvain is too tired to fight with Felix about this. According to the clock in his room, it’s nearly 6 in the morning and he knows that all of his friends have class in the morning and instead they’re all cooped up in the hospital because he was being a dumbass. He fiddles with the blanket on the bed and drops his gaze away from Felix. 

“Can you send her back in?” he asks softly. 

Felix’s expression relaxes and he nods, slipping out of the room. Sylvain is alone with the gentle beeping of machines and the ticking of a clock for a few minutes until the door clicks and Ingrid steps back into the room. Her eyes are red around the edge and a little puffy and Sylvain feels like the worst person ever for making his girlfriend cry. She deserves better. 

“Hey,” he calls, holding a hand up towards her. 

Ingrid gives him a weak smile and takes his hand. He scoots his butt over so that she can sit on the edge of the cot, still holding his hand. Sylvain runs a thumb over the back of her hands. They’re stained with ink from long nights spent studying and crying over papers and lab reports and tests. His are riddled with little scars from a stupid, daredevil childhood. He’s totally in love with her hands. 

“I heard Felix called my dad,” he says quietly.

Ingrid nods. “I told him to.” Her expression slips a bit and she looks disappointed in him for a moment. 

Sylvain curses himself again and squeezes her hand. “Ing, I’m going to tell him. I’ll tell him as soon as he gets here, I promise.”

She frowns at him. “We’ve been together for a year and he doesn’t know.”

It’s a reflex that causes him to spit out the next few words. “Neither does your father. In fact, you’re still not even willing to let me meet your brothers, much less your father.”

They both tense. This conversation had been an apology right up until they both started prying into insecurities that have been popping up in their relationship the last couple months and it is quickly veering straight into another fight. Sylvain needs this not to turn into another fight. He doesn’t want her to be mad at him. 

“I don’t want to talk about that,” he says hurriedly. “I just wanted to tell you that I loved you and I’m sorry that you’re here with me right now.”

She leans forward and brushes some of his hair off his face, her eyes softening with his apology. “I love you,” she replies calmly. 

He squeezes her hand again. “Don’t you have class soon?”

She shakes her head. “I’ve got someone sending me notes today.” She tugs a lock of hair lightly, teasing him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Sylvain has never felt safer in his entire life than this moment when his beautiful girlfriend leans down and presses a gentle kiss to his forehead. As far as he’s concerned, everything else can come later.


	4. track 4: you didn't even hear me out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Doesn’t mean that I’m just going to leave you,” she adds quickly. She pats his arm. “One second.”_
> 
> _She slips past him towards her living room, grabbing a box of cigarettes off the top of a coffee table. Sylvain looks at her questioningly. She holds out the box to him._
> 
> \- Sylvain has a talk with a friend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mish is feeding us the fluff, so I have to counter, that's just how this works, right?
> 
> Anyways, I almost made this chapter a whole lot sadder, but then I shook it up a bit. Warnings for poor coping mechanisms and grief. 
> 
> Don't smoke kids, It's bad for your lungs, brain, teeth, and body. (I work in a lung health lab, I'd be remiss if I didn't add this).
> 
> **Track 4: exile**

_track 4: you didn’t even hear me out_

* * *

_five years ago_

* * *

“Dorothea! Open this fucking door!” Sylvain yells, pounding his fist against it. 

“Fuck off, Sylvain! You’ve done quite enough!” Dorothea yells back through a two-inch piece of wood. 

Sylvain’s energy drains out of him and he presses his palm flat against the door. All the adrenaline and panic that has been keeping him going until this moment evaporates into thin air and then his whole body crumples. His knees knock against the door as he collapses in front of it, slamming his fist on the wood again. 

“Please, Dorothea, _please_ , open the door,” he whispers.

His voice is a thread away from breaking and deserting him entirely. He’s half-sitting, half-kneeling right outside of Dorothea’s apartment door and he can’t fucking breathe. His chest is brutally tight and his eyes are burning. His hand shakes so badly that he can’t even press it to the door without it quivering. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m _sorry_ ,” he gasps, tears rolling over his cheeks. “Please, Ingrid, please. Just let me say that I’m sorry.”

The door opens suddenly and Sylvain falls straight forward at Dorothea’s feet. He scrambles up, straightening his shirt and preparing his apologies and the words he’s prepared to beg, but the look on her face sends every thought in his head scattering into the wind. He gets light-headed so quickly that he nearly collapses right back to the ground. 

Only Dorothea’s quick reaction, grabbing him by the biceps, keeps him on his feet. Her lips press together and she steers him into her apartment. She lets go of him and closes the door behind them. Despite what he has already guessed, Sylvain looks around desperately, his head spinning. 

Her living room is empty. The kitchen is empty. If he searches every room in the damn apartment he knows that the whole thing will be empty. _Because she isn’t here_. She had told him that she would be here and she isn’t. 

He turns back to Dorothea and he can’t help the despair painted across his face. “Where is she?” he asks quietly. 

Dorothea gives him a look that’s half-pitying and half-disappointed. “Sylvain,” she says quietly. 

“I don’t want your pity, Dorothea,” he snaps. “Where is she?” 

The volume of his voice catches him off guard and he drops his shoulders, releasing the tension in them. He lets his anger drain away, leaving the sadness permeating his being to fill the void. His throat is dry and his head hurts and he just wants a drink or a smoke or both. 

“She’s with Annette, I think,” Dorothea says quietly. “I think you should let her be.”

Sylvain closes his eyes and tries to force his emotions down in his chest. “Yeah,” he mumbles hoarsely. “I probably should.”

“Doesn’t mean that I’m just going to leave you,” she adds quickly. She pats his arm. “One second.”

She slips past him towards her living room, grabbing a box of cigarettes off the top of a coffee table. Sylvain looks at her questioningly. She holds out the box to him. 

“We’ll share,” she says simply. 

“I thought singers weren’t supposed to smoke.”

She laughs dryly. “If I cared what this shit was going to do to my voice when I’m older, I would have picked a less stressful career.”

Sylvain can’t help but smile at her cynicism. It reminds him of himself. He takes the cigarette box from her and offers her his arm. He feels steadier on his feet all of a sudden. It’s as if Dorothea’s shitty outlook on her future makes him feel better about his own shitty future. Dorothea links her arm with his and they walk to the door of her apartment. 

She doesn’t lock the door when they leave and they take the stairs down three flights to the fire exit. The stairwell smells a bit like spoiled milk and Sylvain holds his breath and breathes through his nose as they descend. Dorothea opens the door to the outside and the warm summer air wafts in through the door. 

Sylvain steps outside and flips the cigarette box in his hand idly as Dorothea reaches down, shifting a rock to block the emergency door from closing behind them. He breaks the plastic wrapping on the box with a fingernail as he waits for her and slips the plastic sheath into his pocket. He trades it for his lighter. 

Dorothea grabs the box from his hand before he can open it and she pulls a cigarette out for herself before offering him the open box. He takes one and puts it between his lips. She closes the box and puts it in the pocket of her jeans. She puts her own smoke between her lips and leans towards him, waiting. 

He flicks the clasp on his lighter, catching a small flame at the tip. He leans over and catches the end of her cigarette before moving the small, flickering flame to the tip of his own. The cigarette sizzles as it catches and the tip glows softly as he slides his lighter away. Sylvain pulls it from his lips, watching it glow softly for a second. 

He pulls it back, inhaling deeply. He was only fifteen the first time he picked up a cigarette. It wasn’t quite the crutch that alcohol could be, but they were good enough at relieving his stress. He didn’t usually smoke with other people. Ingrid looked down upon it and so did Annette and Mercedes. Dedue had never voiced his disapproval, but it registered on his face whenever the subject was brought up. He’d never dared to bring it up in front of Ashe or Dimitri. 

Felix and Hilda are the only people he has ever really smoked with. Felix had smoked with him when Sylvain was 16 and Felix 14. It had just been the once in a moment of total weakness for Felix where Sylvain had extended an unhealthy coping mechanism as a way to try and help. It hadn’t really helped. Felix hasn’t touched a cigarette or a lighter since that night. Hilda is much more casual about smoking. She does it here and there, but only when she is really riled up about something. 

Dorothea smokes like he does. Slowly, casually, and in no particular hurry to consume as many cigarettes as he can in a short amount of time. She blows a slow, heavy curl of smoke out of painted red lips and gives him a sharp smile. 

“Do you think she’ll come back this time?” Dorothea asks quietly, holding her glowing cigarette between two fingers. 

Sylvain blows out a breath of his own, watching the musty grey smoke curl into the dusk air around him. “I don’t know,” he says. He doesn’t. 

It’s far from the first fight that he and Ingrid have had over the course of their relationship, but it’s the first time that Sylvain can safely feel that he doesn’t know if their relationship will ever really recover from. 

“How did you know?” he asks her. It’s not a particularly nice question to ask of her when she’s only a few weeks out of her last relationship, but he has to ask. 

She coughs and waves away a plume of smoke. The tip of her cig flickers with light and she frowns. “How did I know when Felix and I were fucked up?” She smiles wickedly. “Probably the first time he called me Annette when I gave him a blowjob.”

Sylvain frowns. “Fuck, Thea, I’m sorry.”

She shrugs and takes another slow drag. “Honestly, I’m not surprised anymore. She’s been it for him forever. But, she’s dating Caspar right now and he’s so hung up on all of his bullshit that it’ll take them a while to work it out.”

Sylvain shakes his head. “It’s fucked, that’s what it is.”

She smiles sadly and taps the tip of her cigarette to his. Ashes flutter down to the ground. “Everything’s fucked in this city. Everything’s fucked in this damn country, Sylvain. You’ve always known that."

He sighs. “I know.”

“If you want her to stay, you have to give her space, you know,” Dorothea continues. “Ingrid loves you, I know she does. And I know you love her too.”

“If I give her space to run, that’s what she’ll do,” Sylvain corrects. “She runs away, Dorothea.”

“Maybe she needs to.”

“She didn’t need to when Glenn died,” he says abruptly. 

He flicks his cigarette and falls silent, watching his ashes drift downward. He scuffs the toe of his shoe along the crumbling concrete of the alley behind Dorothea’s building. He flicks his cigarette again and takes a glance at Dorothea. She’s smoked hers to the nub so she drops it, stamping it out with her shoe. She pulls another one out of her pocket and holds it up to Sylvain. 

He holds the tips close together and she blows on the ends of them until hers catches on the embers of his. She retreats, looking thoughtful, as she takes another drag. 

“Did she have a thing for Glenn?”

“I don’t know,” Sylvain admits. “Not that she’d ever admit to me anyways. Especially now.” He shakes his head bitterly. “We were so stupid back then. What kind of idiot kids burn everything that reminds us of him? He was Felix’s brother and we just tossed his shit into a bonfire that night like nothing mattered.” He laughs. “Dimitri’s fucking parents had just died too.”

“Sounds like Felix,” Dorothea grumbles. “Avoidant piece of shit.” She pauses. “Doesn’t really sound like the rest of you though. If Glenn meant so much to you guys, what were you thinking?”

Sylvain runs the hand not holding the smouldering cigarette through his hair. “We were a bunch of stupid kids, I guess. They were fourteen, I was sixteen. I’ve regretted it since the moment we did it.”

“What set you guys off this time?” Dorothea asks. “She was upset when she called me, but she said it was her fault.”

Sylvain frowns. “Fuck that. It wasn’t her fault.” He pauses. It kind of is her fault, when he thinks about it, but it’s his fault too. 

“What happened?” Dorothea asks again. 

Sylvain drops his butt to the ground and twists his heel over it. The ashes glow orange for a moment before they fade to grey and Sylvain stares at the ground. Dorothea pinches his arm. He winces and looks up at her, narrowing his eyes angrily. 

“You literally came to my apartment like a broken man, Sylvain. I think I deserve some answers.”

“She got a job in Daphnel. At the university there. She wasn’t going to tell me until after she accepted the position,” he mutters. 

Dorothea frowns. “She doesn’t keep secrets from you.”

“Recently she does,” he corrects. He can’t ignore his own influence on the problem. “She’s not the only one either.”

Dorothea punches him in the arm. He rubs at where she hit him, but he doesn’t have the energy to fight her about it. He deserves it. His thing with Ingrid is falling apart and there’s nothing he can do about it. They don’t talk without arguing anymore because she wants to talk about his father and Miklan and he wants to talk about her work and the way that she avoids every issue swirling around her. 

He’s always had Ingrid. Since he was five and she was three, he remembers her being there with bright green eyes and a laugh that sounds like bells. They moved in together when she went into university, as friends, of course, but after a year and a half, their relationship changed and they became Ingrid and Sylvain, the couple, instead of IngridandSylvain, the childhood friends. 

It’s been two and a half years since they got together and Sylvain has had the most miserable last couple of months. Everything turns into a battle between them and he’s just so tired of dealing with it. Still, Dorothea isn’t exactly the person that he wants to discuss any of this with. She’s friends with Ingrid too and in this kind of situation, it’s not what he needs. He had just needed the smoke. 

He pushes his hands into his pockets. “Thanks for the smoke,” he mumbles. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He sets off out of the alley before she can stop him, but she doesn’t call after him. Sylvain fights every instinct that wants to take him three blocks west and five north to Annette’s apartment, and he heads back to the empty apartment where he last saw his girlfriend. He walks silently, hands in his pockets, and his head lowered. 

Their last confrontation had been ugly. She’d yelled at him. He’d yelled at her. Neither of them had actually listened to anything. 

The apartment is dark when he gets back, but Ingrid’s shoes are by the door. Sylvain stops and stares at them, almost in disbelief that they’re actually here and not elsewhere. Because it means that she’s here. 

He washes his face in the bathroom and strips off his shirt, peeking into their bedroom. There’s a lump curled up in the bed, rolled away from his side of the bed. His side of the blankets are neatly tucked under his pillow like they were when Ingrid made the bed that morning. Sylvain watches the lump rise and fall gently for a moment before he grabs the spare blanket quietly off the foot of the bed and makes his way to the couch in the living room. 

He misses the fully packed bag by the door. He’ll never forgive himself for missing the bag.


	5. track 5: anywhere i want, just not home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Annette nods. “Apparently. They’ve been chatting for about three weeks. I think things are still super casual between them, but,” she trails off her gaze darting away._
> 
> _Ingrid bites her lip. Sylvain looks happy, is what she thinks. She wonders the last time Sylvain looked at a woman like that was. Maybe it was when he used to look at her. Her heart clenches and she smiles at Annette politely._
> 
> \- Ingrid faces her match.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The writing train continues. I simply put this album on and then, boom, I'm in a mood.
> 
>   
>  **Track 5: my tears ricochet**   
> 

_track 5: anywhere i want, just not home_

* * *

_present_

* * *

“Let me see,” Dorothea insists. She tugs Ingrid’s hands down and smiles. “Perfect.”

Ingrid frowns. “What do you mean “perfect”? Dorothea, we’re literally going to a bar.”

Dorothea rolls her eyes and leans back. “You’re going to a bar with your ex-boyfriend and a bunch of friends you haven’t hardly seen in five years. You’re going to look damn good, okay?”

Ingrid sighs and stares at her friend. “You can come with me if you want. Dimitri didn’t say it was closed to us only.”

Dorothea practically snorts a laugh. “Oh and see my asshole ex-boyfriend and his fiancée? No thanks.” She reaches up to tug Ingrid’s shirt down another inch, exposing more of her chest. 

Ingrid scowls and pulls it back up over her chest, protecting her modesty. “Dorothea!” she snaps. 

The singer rolls her eyes and steps back, holding up her hands. “Alright, alright. I’ll let it be.”

Ingrid turns back to the long mirror in Dorothea’s bedroom. Dorothea had forced her into a pair of ripped white skinny jeans and a dark green top that rests on the tops of her shoulders with a deep v-neck showing off more cleavage than she normally would have been comfortable showing. 

She smooths the material of the shirt down and turns to look back at Dorothea. “Shouldn’t I wear something warmer? It is cold outside.”

Dorothea laughs. “Alcohol warms you up, dear, not to worry. Besides, you’re going to wear a coat on top. I’m not a monster. Now, will you let me do your face too?”

Ingrid bit the inside of her cheek. “Fine, but nothing extravagant.”

Dorothea grabs her hand and guides her over to a vanity, pushing her down into its plush seat. Ingrid scans her eyes over it and sees a few photos tucked around the outside of the mirror frame. There’s one of Petra and Dorothea hugging where Petra is laughing wildly. Dorothea looks happy in it. There’s one of the Black Eagles dodgeball team from university where Dorothea is sticking her tongue out. 

There’s one that’s just a pair of hands above a city street. Ordinarily, she could have just moved on past the photo, but Ingrid recognizes a small white scar marking on the wrist of the hand that looks like a man’s. She doesn’t realize that she’s frowning until Dorothea reaches up, following her gaze, and tugs the photo down, placing it face down on the dresser. 

“Ingrid,” she says softly. 

Ingrid shakes her head. “It’s not my place to say,” she says quickly. “I left, Dorothea, and you guys were friends first. I can’t expect you to have picked my side. You were friends too.”

Dorothea touches Ingrid’s cheek lightly and Ingrid sees a sincere sadness in Dorothea’s eyes, a rare sight compared to the stunning stage smile she often wears. “There was never anything between us, you know that right? Maybe there would have been without you and without Felix, but there was never anything before and there was definitely nothing after.”

Ingrid smiles plainly, but her chest aches. “Yeah,” she mumbles. “But, maybe there should have been. You guys could have been good together.”

Dorothea shakes her head and drops her hand from Ingrid’s face, picking up a foundation brush. “Oh, no, definitely not. If your guys’ fights were that bad, Sylvain and I would have torn each other to shreds. We’re much too similar for any of that.”

They are mostly content in their silence after that point as Dorothea dusts pale powder onto Ingrid’s face and comes very close to stabbing her in the eye a few times with an eyeliner pencil and eyeshadow brush until Ingrid finally shooes her away. Ingrid turns to the mirror, studying her appearance. 

She looks like herself, just prettier. It’s nice to feel pretty, she realizes belatedly. Ingrid has spent so much time working and studying in the last 9 years she has hardly had time for herself to look pretty. Even when she was with Sylvain who did a good job of making her feel pretty, she still never wore much makeup. Looking at Dorothea’s nicely applied job, Ingrid feels pretty and a little more ready to face everything that’s waiting for her at the Azure Moon pub where she’s meeting everyone. 

She turns back to Dorothea and smiles faintly. “Thanks,” she says quietly. 

Dorothea smiles and brushes a lock of Ingrid’s short hair behind her ear before kissing her on the forehead. “Of course.”

* * *

Ingrid gets out of the cab outside the Azure Moon and immediately recognizes the decrepit sign hanging from one hook and spray painted over in place. It’s like this place hasn’t changed since she was in first-year university. She hopes they still have the beer-battered wings. They had always been her favourite. 

She tugs her coat around her as she pulls open the door to the bar, ducking inside its familiar, beat-up interior. There’s an older rock song playing over the speakers and there’s a clinking of glass and raucous laughter that makes her stop just inside the doorway and breath it in. She’s missed this place. She had realized it, but she’s been noticing little things about the city that she’s been missing the last five years. 

It’s easy enough to spot her friends from the entrance. Dimitri and Dedue tower over any crowd and Sylvain’s there too, an arm over Dimitri’s shoulder, wearing a wide smile. Ingrid takes a deep breath and heads towards them. She makes it almost all the way to Mercedes, who is standing next to Dedue when she’s cut off by Byleth who redirects her to the bartender. 

“Whiskey, neat,” Byleth orders, not letting go of Ingrid’s arm. She turns her brilliant green eyes on Ingrid who sighs. 

“Pint of whatever’s on tap please,” she orders. 

Byleth, satisfied, releases her and smiles broadly. “Hi, Ingrid, I’m glad you made it tonight.”

Ingrid smiles. “I wouldn’t miss it,” she replies. It’s the truth too and that makes something in her stomach warm pleasantly. While it’s weird to be here trying to fit in places she hasn’t fit for five years, she has missed her friends. And really, she wouldn’t have missed this. 

Their drinks arrive shortly after and they’re about to head to the others when Byleth glances behind her. 

“Did you bring anyone?”

Ingrid blinks. Besides Dorothea, the thought hadn’t even occurred to her to invite anyone. Her closest friends were all present already. “No?” she says, confused.

Byleth shrugs. “Ah, okay. Come on.” Byleth’s grip is a bit tighter this time as she drags Ingrid over to their friends. Ingrid drapes her coat over a chair already covered with coats and resists the urge to cross her arms over her barely covered chest. 

Sylvain sees her coming first and immediately he’s tossing something at her. Ingrid’s left hand comes up purely out of reflex to snag the item out of the air. She somehow manages to do it without spilling her beer on Byleth and she stares at the thing that Sylvain tossed her. It’s a balled up, bright pink glove that can only belong to Annette or Mercedes. 

By the way that Annette immediately appears in front of her, Ingrid can make a pretty good guess at whose glove it is. She drops it into Annette’s hand and then immediately gets squeezed into another Annette Dominic hug. Ingrid pats her friend on the back awkwardly, still trying not to spill her drink. 

“Nice catch, Ingrid,” Sylvain calls to her.

She looks up at him, surprised and is almost unnerved by the easy smile on his face. “Thanks?”

“Still playing ball?”

She bites her lip. Right. He has to ask her these questions now. “Women’s league,” she confirms. 

He nods, but then he turns away. Ingrid’s attention follows him and she sees him turn to a pretty woman that’s next to him. She has a slender face and light blue hair that’s pulled out of her face in an elegant bun. It’s the same girl who dropped him off at their coffee date. Ingrid tears her eyes away and takes a sip of her beer. 

Dimitri notices her then and she gets swept up into conversation, catching Dimitri, Dedue, and Ashe up on her work in the lab and the fact that she has a junior faculty position coming up now that she’s finished her Ph.D. Ashe’s eyes gleam when she mentions the thesis she had recently just defended. 

“So you’re Dr. Galatea now then?” he asks. 

Ingrid laughs lightly. “You know, I guess I am. Still feels kind of weird.” She refocuses on Dimitri. “So, tonight?”

His cheeks flame in the same way they did when they were younger. Ingrid smiles into her half-empty glass. It’s enough of a confirmation of why they’re all gathered and why Dimitri asked them all to be here. She pats his arm and glances over her shoulder at Byleth who is chatting with Petra, who came with Ashe, Felix, and Mercedes. 

“Congratulations, Dimitri,” she says.

His blue eyes soften and flicker towards where Sylvain is entertaining his mysterious blue-haired friend and chatting with Annette. Ingrid lifts her chin and fights her instinct to turn and watch him. Even being able to hear his voice in the background makes her nervous because she’s so used to so much of her life revolving around Sylvain, it still feels weird that it can’t anymore. 

She drains the last of her beer at that thought and stares at the bottom of her glass for a second. 

“Ingrid!” Annette exclaims suddenly, reappearing. “Let’s get refills!”

She drags Ingrid away from the boys towards the bar, but stops short of flagging down the bartender. Ingrid places her empty glass down and tugs her arm free of Annette’s grip. She frowns. 

“What?”

“Her name is Marianne von Edmund. She’s 27 and she’s from east of Derdriu. Hilda introduced them,” Annette relays quickly. 

Ingrid steals a look back at Sylvain and the blue-haired young woman. The woman smiles shyly and despite the way she dips her head, Sylvain ducks, following her, with a radiant smile on his own face. She sees him laugh and she turns back to Annette. 

“Hilda introduced them?”

Annette nods. “Apparently. They’ve been chatting for about three weeks. I think things are still super casual between them, but,” she trails off her gaze darting away.

Ingrid bites her lip. Sylvain looks happy, is what she thinks. She wonders the last time Sylvain looked at a woman like that was. Maybe it was when he used to look at her. Her heart clenches and she smiles at Annette politely.

“I’m going to get some air,” she says, just loud enough to be heard over the music.

Annette looks concerned, but she doesn’t argue. She understands a few things about ugly breakups and running in the same social circles as her ex. Ingrid turns away from her and makes her way to the back exit of the bar. She brushes out the door onto the patio. 

In the summer the patio is usually open with more chairs and tables for outdoor engagement, but at the end of November, the patio furniture is all stacked and locked up. She walks to the far side of the patio and leans on the railing, peering out into the dark of the back parking lot of the Azure Moon. Maybe in another life this would have been scary, but Ingrid knows this bar and this place even if she hadn’t been here in five years. 

She pulls her phone out of her pocket and dials her most recent contact. He picks up on the fourth ring. 

“What are you doing, Claude?” she asks, ignoring a greeting. 

“ _Isn’t it a bit late for my shenanigans?_ ” he replies calmly. “ _Aren’t you at Dimitri’s thing tonight?_ ”

“You told Hilda I was coming back, didn’t you?”

A pause. “ _I wasn’t aware that was classified information_.”

“You know I wasn’t telling people about that.”

“ _She’s hard to avoid, Ingrid, you know that,_ ” Claude points out.

“Then why is she setting Sylvain up with a friend of hers?”

“ _Maybe it’s because she actually thought Marianne and Sylvain would look good together. Marianne’s a nice girl._ ”

Ingrid sighs because that is exactly what she’s afraid of. Marianne seems wonderful and she looks like she has been making Sylvain happy. It’s terrifying. Her silence must be enough of an answer for Claude. 

“ _I_ _t’s okay to be jealous, Ingrid. Not gonna say that I haven’t had the urge to sock Dimitri in the teeth a few times over the last seven years._ ”

She fiddles with the long sleeve of her shirt. “It’s been five years, Claude.”

“ _You loved him, Ingrid. That kind of stuff doesn’t go away overnight. Especially with how you guys left it._ ”

She hums softly. It’s upsetting to think about the breakup again, but maybe it’s time she starts dealing with it. Sylvain seems to have his shit together mostly since he’s seeing a therapist, something Ingrid never could have gotten him to do, and it looks like he’s seeing other people. Her dating card is a bunch of blanks in the last five years, minus a short and sweet relationship with Ignatz three years ago when he’d been at art school in Daphnel. 

She’s about to reply to Claude when the door swings open back to the bar and she turns around quickly. She finds herself facing Sylvain who pauses, one hand still on the door handle. She hangs up on Claude immediately with no farewell and shoves her phone into her pocket. 

“Hi,” she mumbles.

Sylvain smiles faintly. “Hey. Was looking for you.”

She shrugs. “Here I am.”

It’s awkward again.

Sylvain gathers himself first and he lets the door to the bar close behind him. He walks towards her and leans on the railing next to her. This is familiar to her. They have done this dozens of times in the past. But not in the last five years. 

“Marianne seems nice,” she says, breaking the silence. 

Sylvain chuckles lightly. “She’s sweet,” he agrees. He looks at her. The shadow of the patio casts strange shadows across Sylvain’s face that seems to add years to his face. 

He looks tired out of the lighting of the bar. He looks like he needs to sleep for ten years and Ingrid feels guilty all of a sudden. From what she has learned, Sylvain has worked hard to get his life back on track since they broke up. Her being here isn’t easy on her own mental state and she hasn’t even started thinking about his feelings. She also doesn’t want to think about Marianne’s feelings. It’s got to be confusing to have your new kind of boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend pop up suddenly. 

“Are you okay, Ingrid?” he asks her. 

“No,” she says because lying to Sylvain has never been her strong suit. 

He exhales in a short huff, almost a laugh, but not quite. “No, me neither,” he agrees quietly. 

Ingrid leans into him, pressing her temple to his shoulder. Sylvain’s chin rests on top of her head and they stand in silence under the single, greasy light on the patio of their favourite bar. It’s the first thing about tonight that really feels _wrong_ , but Ingrid can be a selfish person sometimes so she takes this and gives nothing back.


	6. track 6: i'm still on that tightrope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“What were you doing, Sylvain?” she asks._
> 
> _“I don’t know,” he whispers. “I don’t know what I was doing,” he breathes._
> 
> _She doesn’t take her hands off his face as she leans forward, knocking their foreheads together and closing her eyes. “You scared me.”_
> 
> \- Ingrid extends a hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNING: This chapter features mentions of suicidal ideations and poor mental health that has led to suicidal thoughts in the past. Please, please, please, read with care. This fic is rated M for a reason. 
> 
> mirrorball really shouldn't have one of the darkest chapters of this fic, but it worked out this way.
> 
> **Track 6: mirrorball**  
> 

_track 6: i’m still on that tightrope_

* * *

_present_

* * *

Ingrid is half asleep on Dorothea’s couch when her phone buzzes the first time. She huffs and tugs the blanket up over herself stubbornly. She keeps her eyes fixed on the page of the book she’s reading, but her gaze strays to the coffee table where her phone is when it buzzes for a second time. She hesitates and frowns. 

Leaning over, she picks it up. There’s a single text from Sylvain followed by a shared location. Ingrid’s blood turns to ice and she nearly falls off the couch in her hurry to kick the blanket off her legs. She opens the text and immediately tries to call him, cradling the phone against her face. 

It goes to voicemail immediately. 

She takes a deep breath and dials Felix. Felix picks up on the second ring. 

“ _Ingrid_?”

“What’s Sylvain’s address?” she asks hurriedly. 

“ _Uh, let me text it to you. Why?_ ”

“He lent me something. I promised him I’d give it back and he’s not replying to my text.” Her lie is flimsy, but Felix doesn’t call her out on it. 

Felix audibly pulls his phone away to send her a text and she glances at the address when it arrives. It’s the same location that Sylvian had shared and she takes a short, worried breath in. Somehow, Felix either chooses to ignore it or lets it be. 

“Thanks, Felix,” she says and hangs up. 

She opens the text conversation with Sylvain and tries to call him again. She goes to voicemail again. She reads the text he sent her and frowns, worry crawling up her spine. She quickly memorizes the location sent to her by both Sylvain and Felix and shoves her phone in her pocket. She grabs her keys from the dish next to the door and steals a pair of Dorothea’s slide-on shoes as she darts out the door. 

The city is quiet as she drives to the address. She manages to find street parking across the street and she looks both ways across the dark street before jaywalking to the apartment building. Ingrid approaches the doors and notices the buzzer. She feels nervous suddenly, but she buzzes Sylvain’s apartment. 

The buzzer rings blankly with no answer. 

Ingrid wipes her palms on her leggings and buzzes the apartment next to Sylvain’s. It rings through. 

" _Who is this?_ ”

“Hi, uh, I’m Sylvain’s friend. He asked me to come over but I think he fell asleep. Would you be willing to buzz me in?”

“ _Whatever,_ ” the voice replies and then the lock buzzes, allowing her access. 

Ingrid exhales in relief. She yanks open the door and basically sprints through the lobby to the elevators. She punches the up button and steps in as soon as the doors ding. She hesitates, hovering her finger over the button for her floor before she thinks better of it and pushes the button for the roof. 

The whole twelve seconds in the elevator, Ingrid paces back and forth, wringing her hands in front of her. When the doors ding open, Ingrid practically pushes through them. She spots the emergency exit that leads to the roof and she runs towards it. The door is propped with a rock to prevent it from closing properly so she ensures that she repositions the rock to keep the door cracked as she steps outside. 

It’s dark on the roof, but not dark enough that she can’t see the lumped shadow at the edge of the roof. Her heart drops into her stomach. This is a sight she had never wanted to see again and this is a place she had hoped to never have to go back to. She takes a tentative step forward, crunching her foot on the thin layer of loose gravel on top of the roof. 

The lump doesn’t move as she obviously and loudly approaches. 

“Sylvain?” she finally calls, trying to be careful not to startle him. 

He doesn’t turn towards her, but she’s close enough now to see the shock of red hair that identifies her old friend. Ingrid kneels next to him, slowly and carefully resting her hand between his shoulder blades. He’s only wearing a thin shirt, but the cool of the night doesn’t seem to have bothered him any.

“Come away from the edge, Sylvain,” she urges quietly. 

He turns his head towards her and she sees the deep-seated despair and sadness in his eyes that she had hoped to never see again. “You came,” he replies quietly, not moving from the edge of the building. 

His heels tap against the side of the building where his legs dangle off and Ingrid’s breath hitches. They’re too close to the edge. She takes a deep breath and shifts her arms, sliding them around his torso. With a firm pull, she manages to haul him backwards. Unfortunately, Sylvain is much bigger than her, so with the amount of force she has to apply, she unbalances herself and falls flat on her ass. 

Sylvain lands half on top of her, sprawled between her legs and he doesn’t move, resting his head back against her chest. Ingrid sits up and wraps her arms around Sylvain, pulling him into the tightest hug she can muster. She’s trembling with adrenaline and fear as she runs her fingers through his hair and over the curves of his face, making sure he’s okay. 

“You came,” he repeats quietly, his voice cracking. 

He turns in her arms so that they’re both sitting, like fools, on the roof of his building, staring at each other. Ingrid cups his face in her hands and blinks back her tears. Sylvain lifts a hand and tucks a lock of her hair back on reflex and Ingrid stills. 

“What were you doing, Sylvain?” she asks. 

“I don’t know,” he whispers. “I don’t know what I was doing,” he breathes. 

She doesn’t take her hands off his face as she leans forward, knocking their foreheads together and closing her eyes. “You scared me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it again,” she says desperately, not moving away from him.

Sylvain’s hands slid up so he has one on her cheek and the other holding the back of her neck like a lifeline. He exhales shakily against her and Ingrid rubs her thumb over his cheekbone without thinking. His face is cold. 

She leans back but doesn’t let go of his face. Her eyes are wet with tears. “I thought you were seeing someone,” she says softly. 

“I am,” he replies. Conflict flickers across his expression. “We talked about Miklan and my father today and I still haven’t told her about you and me.” He shakes his head. “I came up here to get some air and then I couldn’t make myself go back down.”

Ingrid frowns. “You haven’t told her about you and me? Isn’t that exactly the kind of thing you’re supposed to tell a therapist?”

Sylvain’s laugh is weak and dry. “I don’t know. I guess I thought if I never told her I could pretend that I never lost you in the first place.”

Ingrid’s eyes widen. _Marianne,_ she thinks desperately, _Sylvain is seeing Marianne_. She drops her hands from his face, but he catches them, refusing to let her retreat too far from him. They’re still sitting on the roof and Sylvain is looking at her like he wants her to cut him open and air all his trauma to the world. 

“You can’t say things like that,” she whispers. 

“No, I guess I can’t,” he agrees weakly. 

Ingrid looks past him to the edge of the roof. There’s a short ridge there, but Sylvain had easily been sitting atop it, dangling his legs like it was the simplest thing in the world. It reminds her horribly of some of the moments in the last year of their relationships: the darkest days that she had never wanted to think about again. 

“I thought you were getting better,” she says, her eyes welling up with tears again. “Shouldn’t you be getting better?”

Sylvain looks empty. His eyes are dull and tired as he shakes his head. “I’m never going to get better,” he murmurs. 

_I shouldn’t have come back_ , she thinks. _This wouldn’t be happening if I hadn’t come back at all._

“Thank you, Ingrid,” he continues, “thank you for coming to get me.”

“Why didn’t you call Felix or Dimitri or Mercedes or anyone else who’s been here for you in the last five years? Why did you text me?”

“Because I knew you’d come. Because I needed you to come,” he says simply. 

Ingrid shakes her head fiercely as tears roll down over her cheeks. “What are we doing, Sylvain? You can’t just say things like that anymore.”

He touches her face and she flinches. He drops his hand slowly and she meets his eyes again. Some of the warmth that Sylvain is so known for is starting to creep back into his eyes, but it hurts to see him looking like this again. Looking the way that he had promised he would never look again. 

Looking the way that she had sworn to herself she’d never deal with again. 

“You can’t say that anymore,” she repeats, her own voice breaking. 

“I still need you, Ingrid, I always have.”

“You can’t, Sylvain.” She wipes at the tears rolling over her cheeks. “I can’t do this with you again.”

_I can’t look after you and myself when neither of us wants to be cared for. I can’t see you like this and be reminded of why everything between us went so wrong. I can’t see you like this and miss you and love you and need you too._

“We’re not healthy,” she reminds him quietly. They had broken up for a reason. For many reasons. 

His lip twitches into a tiny, sad smile. “Never said we were. I just don’t know how to be without you.”

She frowns. “You had five years, Sylvain, we shouldn’t be back here again.”

“But you came back.”

“I shouldn’t have,” she says. Saying the words out loud makes her chest ache. “You wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t come back.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Sylvain agrees plainly. He finally drops her gaze, looking down at his lap. 

Ingrid doesn’t know what else to say. She has dragged him back from the physical ledge, but she has no idea what she can do about the mental one he builds for himself. If he wants to jump from that one, she isn’t sure that she’ll be able to stop him. She isn’t sure that anyone will be able to stop him. 

“I hate my father,” he says quietly. “I hate what he did to my mother, to my brother, to me. I hate him.”

Ingrid stares at him. She had seen this part of Sylvain all those years ago, but he never would have put it into words. He has changed some after all. 

“Then why are you still,” she trails off, unsure how to properly and appropriately finish the question. 

“I don’t know.” He looks up at her again. “You hate research. You told me that for years and yet you went off and finished your Ph.D. Why?”

Her stomach twists. “I don’t know.”

All around them the sky is lightening. It will be morning soon. Dorothea will notice that Ingrid is gone from the apartment and Felix will notice something is strange about the phone call he shared with Ingrid in the middle of the night. Someone will figure it out and she can’t still be here when they do. 

Sylvain is looking at her like he’s trying to read her soul and she can’t stay with him. 

Ingrid pushes herself to her feet and extends her hands to Sylvain. She can’t help the tremor in them as he takes them and she pulls him to his feet. She stands still and just holds his hands for a moment, relishing in the way that they feel familiar holding hers. 

“Don’t do this again, Sylvain,” she pleads. “Talk to Dr. Voltovi. Please.”

He swallows harshly and his Adam's apple bobs. “I will,” he whispers. “Please don’t run away again,” he begs quietly. “You’re still Ingrid. Can’t we be best friends again?”

_I can’t promise that,_ she thinks. “Okay,” she says instead. “I’m not going anywhere.” 

In the moment, on Sylvain’s roof, as the sun is about to rise, as she holds his hands tightly, it’s the truth.


	7. track 7: i still got love for you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Annette laughs brightly over the phone. “_ Dimitri’s tough. Felix and I bought our gift last weekend.” She pauses. “Are you out somewhere right now? I’m not doing anything, maybe I can come and meet you. _”_
> 
>  _Ingrid sighs. “I’m trying to buy Dimitri a birthday present, but I really have no idea what to buy him._ ”
> 
> \- Ingrid goes shopping.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sunni told me I couldn't post this today so I waited until midnight. That's fine, right?
> 
> **Track 7: seven**  
> 

_track 7: i still got love for you_

* * *

_present_

* * *

Ingrid has her hands in her pockets as she frowns at the storefront window. The sweater on display is nice, but it is ridiculously expensive. Plus, she doesn’t even know his size. Has it changed in five years? Does he even want more clothes?

She huffs and turns to walk away, but a flash of silver hair catches her eye and she stops cold, staring. The silver is paired with fair skin and a blue-ish silver puffy coat. Ingrid recognizes the coat from the other night at Felix and Annette’s and she walks towards the person without thinking. 

Ashe turns right before she gets there and he smiles brightly. “Ingrid! Hi! What are you doing here?”

She stops and glances at the store she had been standing in front of. “I was trying to buy a birthday present for Dimitri,” she admits. 

Ashe brightens more if that’s even possible. “So you’re staying? I know at the bar last weekend you weren’t sure if you’d still be around for it.”

Ingrid scuffs her toe on the ground. “Well, it is December 1 today, so it won’t kill me to be away from Daphnel for another couple weeks.”

“Hello, Ingrid,” a warm voice said and Ingrid turned to find Petra approaching them. She was completely bundled up, a hat pulled over her hair and ears and her jacket zipped all the way to the top. 

Ingrid smiles. “Hi, Petra, I just saw Ashe and thought I’d come over and say hi.”

Petra steps to Ashe’s side and he smiles at her, his green eyes softening affectionately. Ingrid brings a hand to her mouth to hide her smile. Ashe and Petra had just been friends when she had left for Daphnel originally, but apparently that had changed for the better now. Ingrid steps away from the pair. 

She gestures back to the storefront. “I should probably keep looking to get that present.”

Ashe’s smile slips a bit. “We were about to grab lunch if you wanted to come with us.”

Ingrid shakes her head. “I don’t want to interrupt your date, but we should have lunch while I’m in town.”

He nods, perking up a bit. “Yeah, I’d like that.” Ashe reaches down to take one of Petra’s hands and the pair bids him farewell as they walk away, swinging their hands between them. 

Ingrid watches them go for a minute, a soft smile on her face. It’s nice to see her friends happy and growing into the people she has seen them as. Ashe and Petra seem good for each other, Felix and Annette have finally put their shit to rest and decided that they want to be together, Mercedes and Dedue still seem very much balancing and grounding, and Byleth and Dimitri were absolutely made for each other. 

She turns back to the storefront window and spies a tie in the storefront that makes her crack a smile. It’s a red tie with little Santa Clause faces all over it. It’s absolutely ridiculous looking but it’s something she would have bought for Sylvain without hesitation six years ago. He shows up to the Christmas party every year with the most ridiculous ties and socks he can find as a joke.

She enters the store almost on instinct and begins skimming through a rack of nice shirts. Nothing on the rack really jumped out at her as something Dimitri would want or need, so she moves on to the display of stupid ties. She’s still super torn about buying the hideous and ridiculous Santa tie for Sylvain.  
  
It’s not even that expensive so maybe it would just be a nice gift to remind them both of the times when they weren’t fucked up like they are now. 

She picks up the tie and turns to head to the cashier when she catches sight of a young woman with blue hair. Ingrid freezes. The woman turns towards her, chatting to her friend and Ingrid notices that it definitely isn't Marianne. The hair is too short and the wrong shade of blue, but the thought of the young woman who might be dating her best friend throws the breaks on her plan. 

She quickly turns and places the tie back down. Heart twisting, she quickly makes her way out of the store. She’ll find Dimitri’s gift somewhere else. She steps back out onto the street and the cold air stings at her cheeks. 

There’s a coffee shop on the corner that she could pop into to regroup and make a new plan of where to buy her gift. Ingrid heads for the shop and ducks inside quickly. The bell overhead dings pleasantly and she immediately hears the light music playing. She steps to the side and strips off her gloves. 

She studies the menu of the shop as her mind tries to come up with more ideas. Dimitri likes to ride horses and he and Byleth are the ultimate gym couple. Plus, she knows he likes history and reading as well, but she’s still completely lost as to what to buy him for his birthday. It hadn’t used to feel this hard to buy gifts for her friends. 

She orders a black coffee from the barista and takes it to a table in the corner. She pulls out her phone and calls the first person that she can think of. 

“ _Ingrid?_ ”

“Hi Annette,” she greets, suddenly feeling a bit awkward. 

“ _Hi! Do you need something?_ ”

Ingrid hesitates, but then she presses forward. “I’m actually struggling with something and was wondering if you could give me some advice.”

“ _Oh, sure, about what?_ ”

Ingrid sighs. “I’m trying to buy Dimitri a birthday present, but I really have no idea what to buy him.”

Annette laughs brightly over the phone. “ _Dimitri’s tough. Felix and I bought our gift last weekend."_ She pauses. “ _Are you out somewhere right now? I’m not doing anything, maybe I can come and meet you_.”

Ingrid smiles. “I would love that, Annette. I’m at the Gatekeeper’s Coffee on the corner of 18th and Wilson right now. I can wait for you here or meet you somewhere else.”

“ _Give me twenty or thirty minutes and I’ll meet you there if that’s alright?_ ”

Ingrid agrees and they end the call. She sips at her coffee and scrolls aimlessly through the news and her social media feeds until Annette arrives in a blur twenty-eight minutes later. She has snow in her hair that starts to melt as soon as she steps into the cafe and her hair is pulled up into a bun that’s only partly staying together. She looks tired, but she looks good. 

Ingrid waves her over and Annette beams, making her way over. She sinks into the chair across from Ingrid with a sigh, pulling her coat off as she sits. “Hi,” she greets. 

Ingrid smiles at her and spins her empty cup around. “Thanks for coming.”

Annette reaches across the table to touch Ingrid’s hand. “I’ll take every excuse to see you if we really can’t convince you to stay.”

Ingrid looks down, feeling guilty. She had called Judith again the night before and her boss had basically told her she would be fired if she tried to come in and work before the new year. With no one she knew in Daphnel over the holidays, Ingrid had no real reason to go back, especially when Dorothea had the open spare room. 

“I’ll be around until Dimitri's birthday at least,” she admits quietly. 

Annette smiles. “Yay! Oh, Ingrid, it’s so nice to have you back.” 

Ingrid notes the tired look in Annette’s eye and she frowns, leaning forward. “Are you okay? You look tired.”

Annette waves her off. “I have a bunch of stuff to wrap up with work before we go on break and Felix and I stayed up too late looking at wedding venues last night.” She laughs to herself. “Can you believe that he’s being pickier about this than I am?”

Funnily enough, Ingrid can picture it. Felix has a soft spot for beautiful, elegant things though he would never admit it out loud. She doesn’t say it out loud, but it does make her smile to think about it. She glances at Annette’s ring. 

“Do you guys know when you want to get married?”

“We’re thinking in the fall. It gives us almost a year of being engaged, which,” Annette pauses, discomfort flickering across her face, “might be a good thing for us.”

Sympathy washes over Ingrid and she touches Annette’s hand. “Hey, Annette, don’t worry. You and Felix? You’re serious about each other. You wouldn’t have gotten back together if you weren’t serious about making it work this time. He wouldn’t have proposed to you if he didn’t think that you guys could make it work this time.”

Annette gives her a weak smile. “It’s just hard. I’m no bombshell like Dorothea was and Felix is so different from Caspar. We’re different from Dimitri and Byleth and Mercie and Dedue. You’ve seen the way that Dimitri looks at Byleth. They just got engaged last weekend and they already look like they’re going to get married tomorrow. Plus, I don’t think I could do it if we broke up again. I’ve just seen what it did to you-” Annette cuts herself off sharply, slapping her hands over her mouth. 

Ingrid has already recoiled instinctively. Felix and Annette had been broken up when she and Sylvain broke up, but hers and Sylvain’s breakup was definitely a major pressure and influence on their friend group. Ingrid had never considered that it might have affected the way that Annette or the others viewed their own relationships.

“I’m sorry,” Annette squeaks, still covering her mouth. “I know it’s not a good topic at all and that was the least sensitive way ever to bring it up.”

Ingrid forces herself to smile. “Annette, it’s okay. Sylvain and I broke up five years ago,” she reminds quietly. 

“Isn’t it hard to see him?”

Ingrid stares into the stained bottom of her coffee cup, unable to hold Annette’s gaze as she thinks about the desperate and painful discussion she had had with Sylvain on the roof of his building. It is hard. It is hard to look at him and see all the time they spent together as kids and then as partners and to know that there is a five-year gap that prevents them from fitting together the way they used to. 

“He’s seeing someone else,” she answers evasively. 

“Ingrid,” Annette says, frowning. Annette isn’t the most observant or insightful of her friends, but she’s no slouch and she hangs out with Mercedes enough to know when Ingrid is lying through her teeth. 

“Annette, I don’t know what you want me to say,” she mumbles. “Sylvain and my breakup was particularly ugly.”

Annette drops her hands down and reaches for Ingrid’s taking both of them in her own hands. “Do you miss him?”

Ingrid nods slowly. “I do. Sylvain was my best friend before he was my boyfriend and it’s hard to know that we don’t have that connection anymore.”

Annette studies her face. “I don’t know how serious he and Marianne are,” she tries to say, but Ingrid withdraws her hands, shaking her head. 

“Sylvain and I were bad for each other. We blew up our own relationship.”

Annette goes silent for a moment. “You’re still in love with him.”

Ingrid blinks, but by the way that her chest tightens at Annette’s words, she can’t refute the claim fast enough to convince herself, much less Annette. 

“I’m going back to Daphnel in a couple of weeks,” Ingrid says instead. “He’s seeing someone else. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Ok,” Annette says, dropping the subject. “What were you thinking of buying for Dimitri’s birthday?”

Ingrid’s head nearly spins from how quickly Annette can change gears, mostly because she’s still trying to grapple with the fact that she is undeniably still in love with her ex-boyfriend whom she has spent very little time with in the last five years, especially since she has no idea what Sylvain thinks of her now. 

“I was looking at clothes, but it didn’t feel right,” she says after she manages to get her thoughts mostly in order.

“Felix and I bought him that TV series, Fire Emblem? Apparently you guys read the books together as kids and the DVDs for the full series just came out so we thought it would be a nice gift.”

Ingrid smiles. Fire Emblem had indeed been a staple of their childhood. It’s an excellent gift for Dimitri. “I have no idea how to top that,” she says. 

“I heard from a little green-haired birdy that a couple of their tumbler glasses have broken recently. Maybe we can go out and find him a nice set.”

Ingrid laughs. “It’s just like Dimitri to underestimate his strength. I bet he broke them trying to wash them.”

Annette laughs too. “That is what Byleth said happened.” She brightens. “Maybe you can even get the glass etched with something to make them extra special!”

Ingrid considers the idea. “A lion and a lioness maybe,” she suggests. “It would be fitting for them, right?”

Annette beams. “I love it. It sounds totally perfect.”


	8. track 8: and i can see us twisted in bedsheets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Did it help?” she asks. “Telling someone?”_
> 
> _Sylvain hesitates, looking at his own wine glass. He takes a drink and frowns. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I wasn’t in a good place yesterday after talking about it, but I think I’m starting to feel a bit better.”_
> 
> \- Everything gets harder and also easier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Has it been like 12 hours? Is this already done? Yes and Yes. 
> 
> Look this chapter was one of the first ideas I had for this fic.
> 
> **Track 8: august**  
> 

_track 8: and i can see us twisted in bedsheets_

* * *

_present_

* * *

**643-988 (maybe: Sylvain):** _can you come over_

**Ingrid:** _Is something wrong?_

**643-988 (maybe: Sylvain):** _no, I just want to talk to you_

**Ingrid:** _I don’t think it’s a good idea, Sylvain._

**643-988 (maybe: Sylvain):** _please._

**Ingrid:** _twenty minutes._

* * *

Ingrid fidgets in the elevator the whole way up to Sylvain’s floor. She’s been in this apartment exactly one time and it was after she had dragged him off the roof and basically tucked him into bed before she had run away back to Dorothea’s empty bedroom. 

Sylvain’s apartment is 722, she remembers and she walks through the silent hallway of the building towards his apartment. She stops outside his door and lifts her hand to knock, but pauses. It feels _wrong_ to stand here and want to knock on his door. 

It’s wrong because she’s still in love with him and he’s seeing someone else. She shouldn’t have come. She had known it was a bad idea and all it had taken was a single ‘please’ over text for her resolve to crumble down and for her to drive across town to Sylvain’s apartment. She has half a mind to turn and walk away when instinct takes over and she knocks on the door. 

She only has the chance to knock twice before the door is swinging open. Sylvain stands there, looking tired, but relaxed. He doesn’t say anything immediately, just smiling faintly at her. Ingrid folds her arms and he steps back into the apartment, letting her in. She follows him in slowly and he closes the door behind her. 

Ingrid turns to Sylvain as soon as the door closes. “What did you need to talk about?”

He steps around her and walks into his kitchen. He pops the cork on a bottle of red wine and pours two glasses. He picks up one and sips from it before he takes the other one and offers it to Ingrid. She takes it on pure instinct and stares at him, confused. 

“Drink?” he offers. 

She looks down at the wine glass. The burgundy liquid smells nice. It’s probably an expensive bottle. Sylvain likes expensive liquor. Or at least, he had used to. Ingrid takes a sip and then pauses to appreciate the smooth, earthy tones of the wine. It is _definitely_ an expensive bottle. 

“Sylvain,” she repeats, “what did you need to talk about?”

He gently touches her elbow and guides her into his living room. They sit on the couch next to each other and Sylvain takes another sip from his glass, staying suspiciously quiet. Ingrid places her glass down on the coffee table and is about to pry into him again when he finally replies. 

“I believe I said want,” he corrects. “I want to talk to you.”

Ingrid’s hands fidget in her lap and her expression slackens in disbelief. “It’s almost eleven at night and you asked me to come over so we could drink wine and talk like school children?”

He laughs lightly and her heart clenches. “I thought we were going to talk like adults.”

She rubs a hand across her face. “Sylvain, seriously, you just wanted to talk about nothing?”

His smile slips a little. “Well, not nothing. I saw Dr. Voltovi the other day and I told her about us.”

Ingrid stills and studies him. He still seems very relaxed and at ease. He doesn’t look lost and broken like he had the other night. Maybe his therapist had offered some useful insight into helping him heal properly. She picks up her wineglass again and sips from it. 

“You did?”

“I did,” he confirms. “I told her almost everything.”

Ingrid swirls the wine in a slow circle in her glass. “What did she say?” she asks quietly. 

“She said that it sounded unhealthy and that maybe it’s a good thing it broke off.”

Ingrid winces. She knows that it’s true. She and Sylvain had needed to break up. They had been miserable in their relationship and they had been making all of their friends miserable when they had to be around them. They had their own issues to sort out before they were capable of healing from their own personal issues. Ingrid’s not sure she’s even fixed her own problems in the five years she was gone. 

“Did it help?” she asks. “Telling someone?”

Sylvain hesitates, looking at his own wine glass. He takes a drink and frowns. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I wasn’t in a good place yesterday after talking about it, but I think I’m starting to feel a bit better.”

Ingrid wonders what it would be like to have the weights resting on her shoulders disappear. Maybe she should ask Sylvain for his therapist’s number. The thought is almost funny to her and she takes a sip of wine to hide the unintentional smile that curls up her lips. 

Sylvain drapes an arm over the back of the couch. She shifts towards him purely on instinct, but he doesn’t react, just drinking from his glass without even the slightest twitch to his expression. Ingrid tries to keep her expression as neutral as she can, taking another drink. Both of their glasses are more than half-empty now and there’s a slow warmth simmering in her stomach since it has been more than a few hours since she had eaten dinner. 

“So Dimitri and Byleth are getting married,” he says calmly. “So are Felix and Annette.”

“Mhmm,” Ingrid hums in agreement. “I was kind of surprised that Dimitri hadn't already proposed to Byleth. I’ve always known he would.”

Sylvain smiles. “Since the moment they met, I knew she would be it for him. I think it just took him a few too many years to realize that she loves him just as much.”

“And Felix wisened up too,” Ingrid agrees, drinking again. 

Sylvain laughs. “God, I wish you’d been here to see him agonize over that.” He shakes his head. “Annette broke up with Caspar to get back together with him three years ago and he’s spent three years trying to be less of a dick to her so she doesn’t leave him again.” He lifts his glass and smiles at her through it. “I told him to put a ring on it if he really was serious about her this time.”

Ingrid laughs lightly. “Annette tells me he’s been more serious about the wedding stuff than she has.”

Sylvain chuckles. “Sounds like Felix, alright. I’m sure Annette would get married in an itty bitty chapel with no decorations as long as all of her friends were there.” He pauses, looking at her. “Are you going to come back for it?”

“Their wedding?” Ingrid asks, feeling surprised. She’s almost offended that he has to ask that, but then again, she had been away for five years. “Annette asked me to be a bridesmaid when we went shopping together, so I don’t think I have much of a choice on that front.”

Sylvain smiles. “Oh, good.” He withdraws his arm from the top of the couch and ruffles his own hair. “Felix asked me to be his best man.”

Ingrid smiles. “Of course he did.” 

Sylvain drains the rest of his glass of wine and nods to hers. “Drink up,” he suggests jokingly. 

Ingrid, feeling warm and lighter than she has in a long time, drains the rest of her glass. Sylvain hands her his glass and rises from the couch. He drifts away into the kitchen and returns after a minute holding the bottle of wine. He refills both glasses that Ingrid is holding and settles back down on the couch. He places the bottle on the coffee table and takes his glass back from her. 

To her surprise, Ingrid realizes that Sylvain has sat down much closer than he had been sitting previously. With her turned towards him, one leg curled underneath her, he is only about a foot away. Sylvain doesn’t seem to notice or care as he taps his glass against hers. 

“Cheers.”

Ingrid turns her head, drinking from the wine glass to distract herself from Sylvain’s closeness. He’s as charming and handsome as ever and her realization is still spinning around in her head. She doesn’t want to do anything stupid. 

“You still haven’t told me much about Daphnel,” Sylvain continues. “What’s it like there?”

“It’s nice,” Ingrid says noncommittally. “Rent’s not as stupid as it is here in Fhirdiad. It’s an old city and it’s really pretty. Not on the water, but we’re only two hours from one of the nicer National Parks that is on the beach.”

Sylvain smiles and nods. “I bet.”

She doesn’t want to talk about her job, especially not with Sylvain. “I have a few friends there, but it’s funny how we can’t really escape stuff.”

“Escape?”

Ingrid rolls her eyes. “Claude. His godmother is my boss. I’ve seen more of Claude in the last five years than I ever thought I would.”

Sylvain laughs. “Well, I’ve seen more of Lorenz than I thought I’d see in my whole life.” He shakes his head. “Hilda seems determined to make us annoy each other as much as possible for as long as possible. Marianne seems to find it funny too.”

Ingrid bites her lip at the mention of Sylvain’s maybe-girlfriend. “Annette told me that Hilda introduced you two,” she says because apparently she wants to get hurt tonight. 

Sylvain blinks for a second as he obviously compares Lorenz and Hilda and Marianne until he figures out who she’s talking about. “Yeah, Mari needed help moving a few weeks ago and she volunteered me to help. We went for coffee a couple of days later.”

Ingrid takes a long drink of wine. The heat in her stomach bubbles again. “That’s sweet,” she forces out. 

Sylvain’s brow furrows, but he doesn’t call her out. He drinks from his glass again and Ingrid’s eyes are unintentionally drawn to his lips. He pulls the glass away after a moment and Ingrid is already spiralling away down a path she really doesn’t want to fall through. She lifts her own glass between them like some kind of barrier. 

Sylvain frowns and reaches a hand out to push her glass down gently. “Ingrid?”

He’s leaning into her space and she’s a lost cause. She tilts her chin up and presses their lips together lightly. For a second there is nothing, just the taste of wine as she and Sylvain awkwardly kiss while no one moves. 

Just as Ingrid is prepared to yank back and completely run away, Sylvain’s lips part and his nose nudges the side of hers as he continues the kiss. Ingrid almost drops her wine glass as she kisses him back. Sylvain pauses, pulling back from the kiss just long enough to place his glass down and then to take hers, adding it to the coffee table as well. 

Then he’s kissing her again and Ingrid’s hands fist in his soft hair. He smells like expensive cologne: something sweet and fresh. One of his hands cards through her hair and his tongue presses against the seal of her lips. Ingrid parts for him and meets him there, pulling him as close as she can. 

Sylvain, apparently fed up with them sitting side-by-side, drops one hand to her thigh as he tugs it, pulling her on top of him. Ingrid follows willingly as they continue to make out like teenagers. She settles into his lap and drops one hand to his chest, stroking across it over the fabric of his t-shirt. 

Sylvain’s hands drop to her waist as he pulls her flush against him and begins sliding her sweater up her torso. Ingrid pulls back from the kiss long enough to breathe and to strip out of her sweater, leaving her in a black lace bralette. Sylvain’s eyes gleam as he leans back in towards her, kissing at her neck instead of her lips. 

Ingrid sighs and tilts her head, letting Sylvain get reacquainted with familiar territory. His teeth prick lightly at the skin of her neck and she gasps, tugging at his hair again. Sylvain growls beneath her, his palms searing hot against the bare skin of her torso. 

Sylvain kisses up her neck until he reaches the joint of her jaw and neck, by her ear. He presses a featherlight kiss there and Ingrid shivers. As she does, she comes back to herself and realizes what she has done. 

She had kissed Sylvain. And he had kissed her back. And now they’re dangerously close to pressing into territory that hasn’t been tread upon in five years. 

“Sylvain,” she says weakly as he presses another slow kiss to her jaw. “This shouldn’t be happening.”

His hand slides up her back to the clasp of her bralette. He undoes it. “You kissed me,” he says quietly, his voice husky and low right by her ear. 

Ingrid’s hands brace on his shoulders as he slides her bralette off her chest and down her arms. It hangs awkwardly there as she refuses to let go of his shoulders. Sylvain leans back until she can see the burn in his brown eyes. 

It’s dizzying to be wanted by him. Dizzying and addicting. She drops her hands and the bralette falls into her lap. Sylvain runs his hands up her back, stroking over bare skin, but he watches her face, not leaning in to kiss her. 

“I want you,” he says. He says it like it’s easy and simple and uncomplicated. 

Ingrid kisses him. Maybe it can be. Just for tonight. 

Sylvain presses his chest forward against hers and she hums into the kiss, reaching down to tug at his own shirt. He pulls back to yank it over his head and then they are skin-to-skin and kissing again, Sylvain’s hands wandering as Ingrid lets out little gasps every time he finds a sensitive patch of skin. 

“Ingrid,” he says into the crook of her neck between kisses. “What do you want?” his voice is low and sexy and completely destructive to the last bits of her resolve. 

“I want you,” she replies.

Sylvain shifts, cupping her under the thighs as he pulls her up. Her legs curl around him and he holds her tight as he kisses her again, blindly walking them towards his bedroom. Ingrid doesn’t think about anything else besides Sylvain’s lips and his hands and the way that he makes her feel for the rest of the night. 

* * *

She wakes up first in the morning. They’re both completely bare and Sylvain’s arm is heavy over her waist. One of his legs is between hers and it’s nearly impossible to detach herself from him. Thankfully, Sylvain is a heavy sleeper, so she manages to slip free of his grasp. 

Her leggings and underwear are on the floor of Sylvain’s bedroom, but her sweater and bralette are still in the living room. Topless, she wanders out and manages to scrounge the rest of her clothing, putting herself back together. 

Their half-full wine glasses are still on the coffee table next to both of their phones. Sylvain’s phone screen is lit up with a text from Hilda and Ingrid notices there is also a text from Marianne. Guilt twists violently in her stomach and she grabs her phone, ignoring the seven texts from Dorothea, and slides her purse up onto her shoulder. 

She lets herself out of the apartment and hopes that Sylvain won’t remember what had happened. She certainly wishes that she could forget what has happened. 

It’s hard to forget the feel of Sylvain’s hands on her when she’s still in love with him.


	9. track 9: it's hard to be anywhere when all i want is you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Ingrid sighs. “Should I call him?”_
> 
> _Dorothea laughs. “No, definitely not. You already ran out on him this morning. Let him make the next move.”_
> 
> _Ingrid winces at the mention of leaving Sylvain like a dirty hook-up, but she can’t get mad because that’s exactly what had happened. She sighs and pulls her face away from Dorothea’s touch, burying it back in her hands._
> 
> \- Ingrid has a much-needed conversation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when I said I wouldn't update this fic that often? Yeah, that was a lie aha. 
> 
> This chapter is a direct apology for the chaos of Death Day in the Sylvgrid Discord server yesterday which was like 50-60% exclusively my fault. In fact, this chapter is almost SFA (safe for Andi). I say almost because... well...
> 
> **Track 9: this is me trying**  
> 

_track 9: it’s hard to be anywhere these days when all i want is you_

* * *

_present_

* * *

“What do you mean you slept with him?” Dorothea asks, staring at her like she had just said she had been hiding a third eye the entire time they’d been friends. 

Ingrid doesn’t lift her head from the couch pillow it’s currently jammed into. “We slept together,” she repeats, but it’s severely muffled by the pillow so she’s pretty sure Dorothea just hears a jumbled groan. 

“No, Ingrid, what the fuck does that mean?” Dorothea demands. 

Ingrid is yanked upwards from her brooding position lying face down on the couch to face a very much not impressed Dorothea. She shrinks into the couch, dropping her gaze away from Dorothea’s shrewd and very, very judgemental look. 

Dorothea huffs and plants herself next to Ingrid on the couch. “You really did fucking sleep with him, didn’t you?”

Ingrid buries her face in her hands. “I’m so stupid.”

Dorothea’s tense posture softens and an arm wraps around Ingrid’s shoulders. “No, honey, you’re just in love. You had a moment of weakness and slipped up.”

Ingrid pulls away, wiping at her eyes furiously. “He’s literally seeing someone else and I just went in and fucked that whole thing up, Thea. That’s not a slip-up.”

Dorothea cups Ingrid’s face and purses her lips. She stares into Ingrid’s eyes. “Ingrid, look at me.” She shakes her head. “It takes two people to fuck and from what you’ve said, it was definitely not you taking advantage of Sylvain. He’s an adult who made his own decision. A shitty decision, for sure, but that was his choice, not yours.”

“I kissed him, Dorothea.”

“And he invited you over. He kissed you back and he took you to bed. Sure, you can be mad at yourself, but it’s not just your fault,” Dorothea reminds sharply. 

Ingrid sighs. “Should I call him?”

Dorothea laughs. “No, definitely not. You already ran out on him this morning. Let him make the next move.”

Ingrid winces at the mention of leaving Sylvain like a dirty hook-up, but she can’t get mad because that’s exactly what had happened. She sighs and pulls her face away from Dorothea’s touch, burying it back in her hands. 

“I’m such a terrible person,” she groans. “I should have just said no when he asked me to come over.”

“Probably,” Dorothea agrees. “But, it’s over now. You don’t have to bring it up to him ever again. You could just pretend it never happened.”

Ingrid huffs. She stands up and heads for her bedroom. She doesn’t really want to talk to Dorothea right now. Of all the people she knows, Dorothea is one of the last people she would normally go to for real, healthy relationship advice. She loves Dorothea, but the singer hasn’t had the best of luck with genuine relationships.

She flops down onto the bed in the spare room and stares blankly at her phone where it sits on her bedside table. She reaches for it and stares at her phone screen. Sylvain hasn’t messaged her or called her and Ingrid doesn’t know if she’s relieved or disappointed by that fact. 

She opens her contact list and stares at the list of people she could call. None of them seem particularly ideal, so she locks her phone and drops it to the mattress next to her. Ingrid covers her face in her hands and takes a deep breath. Maybe she just needs to go burn off some energy. 

With that idea needled into her mind, she strips out of the clothes she had worn to Sylvain’s apartment and pulls on a long-sleeved shirt and a new pair of leggings. She grabs her headphones from her backpack and syncs them to her phone, starting up her old rock playlist. The first song that comes on was one that Glenn had played for her. 

Her lips curl into an unintentional smile. It has been a while since she could listen to this playlist without feeling overwhelmed, so it is nice to actually hear the pumped-up rock song and feel good about listening to it. Thinking of Glenn still makes her chest ache, but it is almost reassuring that her most emotionally traumatic memories are no longer of Glenn. 

She keeps the music playing as she slips out of the apartment, ignoring the look that Dorothea gives her as she leaves. Ingrid cranks the volume up in her headphones and takes the stairs down the six flights to the ground floor. She’s already feeling better by the time she hits the cold air outside and she takes off jogging down the street. 

She has absolutely no destination in mind as she runs, just letting her feet pound into the pavement to the beat of the music. The lyrics come back to her as she runs and she would hum to herself if she wasn’t pushing her body in cold air hard enough that her chest would ache if she tried. 

She sticks to the main streets, dodging around pedestrians, in order to stay on the properly salted sidewalks. She slows down here and there to avoid icy patches that catch her eyes, but for the most part, she just tries not to lose her balance if her foot skids. She is out of practice running in the winter since it doesn’t get this cold in Daphnel. 

She runs on instinct alone, jogging briskly through the streets of Fhirdiad. She finds herself running to the eastern edge of the city and she doesn’t think anything of it until she recognizes a street name and she skids to a stop, almost wiping out on a small sheet of black ice. Ingrid stares in disbelief at the street sign and wishes that she was literally on the other side of the city. 

She checks her watch and blinks. It’s been almost an hour. She’s been running for an hour and it has taken her this long to realize that her chest is burning and her legs are aching. Now that she’s stopped, she basically has to double over to breathe through the burn in her chest. The mere thought of running all the way back to Dorothea’s apartment nearly makes her sick, but she can’t just take a cab back because she didn’t bring her wallet. 

She sighs and stares at the street sign. She could ask someone to pick her up but then she has to explain how she got here and that idea is even less appealing than running all the way back to Dorothea’s apartment. The other option is the stupidest one she’s come up with all day, but it’s the only one that makes any sense to her. 

Honestly, it makes almost zero sense, but she’s annoyed and cold and sore and she doesn’t want to deal with this shit anymore. 

She walks the remaining two blocks to Sylvain’s apartment building and buzzes him. 

“ _Hello?_ ” his voice comes through and Ingrid takes a deep breath, straightening her shoulders. 

“Buzz me up, Sylvain,” she says. 

He falls silent for a minute. “ _I_ _ngrid?_ ” he sounds in complete disbelief. “ _Did you forget something?_ ”

Sylvain sounds so baffled she nearly laughs. “Just let me up, Sylvain,” she huffs. “It’s cold.”

The line clicks dead and the door buzzes in front of her. Ingrid pulls it open and hurries to the elevator. She taps her foot against the floor of the elevator all the way up to his floor. The doors open and she hesitates, almost slamming the button to go back to the ground, but she’s come this far. 

She’s going to yell at him. She’s kind of already decided that much. She takes a deep breath and exits the elevator, heading towards Sylvain’s apartment. To her surprise, the door is already open and Sylvain is standing in the doorway staring at her as she approaches. She crosses her arms and stops a few feet away from him. 

“What?” she demands.

He shakes his head, running a hand through his hair. He’s shirtless, she realizes belatedly, and wearing a pair of loose pyjama pants that he definitely didn’t wear to bed the night before. 

“Sorry, I just,” he pauses, looking her up and down, “wasn’t really expecting to see you _here_ this morning.” 

Ingrid purses her lips. “Can I come in?”

He steps back, leaving space for her to walk into his apartment. Her gaze immediately darts to the coffee table, but the wine glasses have been cleaned up. She’s almost relieved and disappointed at the same time. Sylvain closes the door and she immediately turns on him, holding up a hand. 

“You’re an asshole,” she accuses.

Sylvain stares at her. “What? Why am I an ass now?”

Ingrid glares at him and folds her arms again. “Last night,” she says bluntly. 

He raises an eyebrow at her. “Oh, I’m the asshole? You’re the one who ran out on me this morning!”

Ingrid slaps a hand to her face. “You idiot! Sylvain, you’re seeing someone else!”

He blinks at her. “I’m what?”

Ingrid stops, confusing washing over her. Her hand drops down and she feels completely lost for a moment. “Aren’t you?” she presses hesitantly. 

Sylvain’s brow furrows. “I mean, no one told me that I was, so no?”

Ingrid turns away from him and paces further into his apartment. Had she fucking imagined everything about his thing with Marianne? Everyone else had been pretty sure that the two of them were a thing. Was everyone wrong? Or had Sylvain just misunderstood her? 

“Marianne,” Ingrid says finally, turning back towards him. “Aren’t you seeing Marianne?”

The realization dawns on him visibly and he laughs, running a hand through his hair. “Oh, god, Ingrid, that’s what you thought?”

She scowls at him. “Well, what else was I supposed to think! You brought her to the bar that night.”

Sylvain’s expression softens and he steps towards her. Ingrid is still annoyed and cold and sore so she steps back, matching him, and the distance between them hangs awkwardly. 

“I’m not dating Marianne,” Sylvain says. “We went on a few dates and yeah, I brought her to the bar, but we’re just friends. She’s a bit too timid for my tastes and I think I’m too extraverted for hers. Besides, I mostly went out with her just to get Hilda off my back. Marianne and I were never even exclusive.”

Ingrid feels like she has been slapped in the face with a dead fish. She doesn’t even have the words to reply as it feels like every coherent thought in her head vacated the moment that Sylvain had answered the door without a shirt on. It’s horribly distracting and she’s still not sure what’s going on. 

Sylvain looks her up and down, taking in her workout garb. He raises an eyebrow. “Did you run here?” 

Her cheeks flush. “It wasn’t my destination when I left, I just ended up here.”

Sylvain chuckles. “Do you want some tea? It’s cold outside.”

She frowns. “No thank you. And you know, not being exclusive is still a shitty reason for what happened last night.”

Sylvain has a fond look on her face and she feels warm under his gaze. She wants it to stop. “Ingrid, Marianne and I called it off literally the day after the Blue Lion night at the Azure Moon."

She huffs and turns away from him. Sylvain steps closer to her and Ingrid retreats, walking further into his apartment. He follows her, matching her step for step until they’re standing in his living room. 

“Did you come here just to yell at me?” he asks. 

She narrows her eyes at him. “Why else would I be here?”

Sylvain runs a hand through his hair. “Maybe so that we could talk about what happened last night?”

“What’s there to talk about?” she says defensively. 

Sylvain’s expression goes blank and it’s almost terrifying to note that she can’t read him right now. “I guess you’re right,” he says calmly. There’s no resentment or disappointment in his voice, but there’s no relief either.

“We can’t do it again, Sylvain,” Ingrid says. 

She’s not quite sure that he’s picked up the meaning behind her words because his eyes sharpen and he walks towards her. This time she manages not to retreat so they end up staring each other down from less than a foot apart. Her hand twitches on complete instinct to bring herself closer to him, but she catches herself. 

“It would be a bad idea,” she says, trying to convince herself as much as she tries to convince him. 

The part of her brain that loves Sylvain desperately, self-destructively, and entirely wants to kiss him again, but she has no alcohol in her system today so she gets control of herself. She steps away and there’s the briefest flash of disappointment in Sylvain’s eyes before he gets his emotions under control and is back to the calmly controlled façade he had been displaying before. 

“Do you want a ride back to Dorothea’s?” Sylvain asks calmly. “It’s a long walk back.”

Even though the last thing Ingrid wants to subject herself to is being in a closed space with Sylvain, she nods. “That would be nice, thanks.”


	10. track 10: but it dies and it dies and it dies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Ingrid turns towards him, frowning. “Giving up?” Her calmness evaporates in favour of annoyance. “You’re going to accuse me of giving up?”_
> 
> _Sylvain is tired of fighting. He doesn’t even have the energy to be angry with her right now. “Daphnel,” he points out. “Glenn,” he continues and when she flinches, he drives it home: “Your goddamn family, Ingrid.”_
> 
> \- It ends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is NSFAndi...
> 
> **Track 10: illicit affairs**  
> 

_track 10: but it dies and it dies and it dies_

* * *

_five years ago_

* * *

The bag is by the front door when Sylvain wakes up on the couch. It’s basically the first thing he sees and he nearly falls off the couch in his hurry to sit up, panic crashing through his chest so quickly that he nearly can’t breathe. He had already kicked off the blanket in the night so as he tries to stand up, his feet tangle in it and he falls back onto his ass on the couch. 

Ingrid laughs at him and Sylvain turns, spying his girlfriend in the kitchen, standing in front of their coffee maker. She’s wearing an old GMU sweater and her hair is in a loose braid down her back and everything seems normal except for the fact that there are two packed duffle bags stacked by the front door of the apartment. 

Sylvain stands up warily and walks towards her. “Hi,” he says quietly. 

“Good morning,” she replies calmly. 

The conversation feels stilted and awkward and not at all how their morning greeting usually goes. Sylvain rounds the counter in the kitchen towards her and doesn’t miss the stiffening of Ingrid’s shoulders. He stops as soon as he sees it, hurt welling up in his throat. 

“Ing,” he practically whispers. 

Her hands fidget around her coffee cup, but she doesn’t turn to face him. Sylvain takes another careful step towards her and she places the mug down. His hands tremble at his sides as he resists the urge to reach out for her. 

“Is that it?” he asks. “You’re just giving up?”

Ingrid turns towards him, frowning. “Giving up?” Her calmness evaporates in favour of annoyance. “You’re going to accuse me of giving up?”

Sylvain is tired of fighting. He doesn’t even have the energy to be angry with her right now. “Daphnel,” he points out. “Glenn,” he continues and when she flinches, he drives it home: “Your goddamn family, Ingrid.”

She steps towards him and jabs a finger into his chest. “Don’t talk to me about family,” she hisses. “And don’t talk to me about Glenn.”

Sylvain’s anger finally reappears. “So we just keep avoiding it forever and making everyone miserable?”

Whatever Ingrid is about to say is cut off by her phone ringing. Her expression twists and she answers the call, turning partly away from Sylvain. 

“Hi Gabe,” she says into the phone. 

Sylvain stares at her. Gabriel is Ingrid’s youngest older brother. He’s three years older than her and Sylvain hasn’t seen him in almost four years, which is, of course, because Ingrid refuses to introduce Sylvain as her boyfriend to her family. It’s a point of contention in their relationship that has been driving him insane for two and a half years. 

“An hour? Ok, I’ll meet you out front,” she says into the phone. Her gaze darts towards him and the greens of her eyes glitter with defiance and a hint of nervousness. “Love you too,” she ends before hanging up the call. 

Sylvain looks at the bags by the door. “You’re not even going to talk to me about it?”

She picks up her coffee cup and takes a slow sip as if she’s trying to recentre herself. “I thought we already had this conversation.”

Sylvain runs a hand through his hair. “Ingrid, you ran away from me. We didn’t have a conversation.”

She purses her lips and turns back to him, lifting her chin. “Guess our conversation went about as well as your conversation with your father went.”

“Don’t do that, Ingrid!” he exclaims. “At least my father knows we’re fucking dating!”

She plants her hand against his chest and shoves him back. Caught off guard, Sylvain stumbles back. Her eyes are filled with tears, but she looks more angry than sad. “And he’s still an abusive piece of shit, Sylvain! What he did to you and your brother? That’s called child abuse.” She shakes her head vigorously. “The shit that he does to you now? That’s called gaslighting.”

Sylvain’s defences shoot up so quickly that he has to step back from her before his anger bubbles up. “That has nothing to do with this, Ingrid. I’m working on him.”

“But you’re still defending him!” she snaps. 

Her anger deflates as suddenly as it had bubbled up and she drops her gaze to the floor, twisting the sleeve of her hoodie in her hand. 

“Dorothea told me you went to her apartment yesterday,” Ingrid says next. 

“Looking for you,” he counters. “Since, you know, that’s where you told me you’d be.”

“And I told you I needed space.”

“So, what? Now you’re just going to run away from me again?” He waves a hand to the packed bags by the door. 

He pauses and turns to look at the bag. It comes together in his mind. Daphnel. Gabe. The arguments. Her nervous twitches this morning. 

“Is that it then?” he asks, turning back to her. “You really are just going to leave.”

Ingrid’s arms cross defensively. “We make each other miserable, Sylvain. What kind of relationship has two miserable people in it?”

He steps towards her so that they are chest-to-chest. He cups her face in his hands and her arms drop to his sides, pressing lightly against his ribcage. “Ours,” he whispers. “And we don’t have to be miserable?”

“Don’t we?” she counters softly. “Is there a way out of this? Do you see a way out of this where we don’t spend the rest of our relationship tearing our friendship and our friends apart?”

Sylvain shakes his head as tears violently fill his eyes. “Ing, please don’t.”

“We haven’t been okay, Sylvain. Neither of us has been okay for a long time.” Her voice breaks and a tear rolls down over her cheek. 

Sylvain’s thumb rubs across her cheek, wiping it away as one of his own spills over. “Can’t we be? Miklan’s gone, I’ll talk to my dad, I’ll move to Daphnel with you, I’ll do _anything_ for you.”

“That’s why we can’t do this,” she whispers, still crying. She touches their foreheads together and a sob chokes in her throat. “Because I can’t give up my life to keep putting us back together. And I can’t ask you to do that either. One day we’ll shatter so hard there will be nothing left to put back together.”

“Don’t go,” he says again, closing his eyes. 

Her lips are salty when she tilts her head up to press them against his. The kiss is nothing more than the barest press of lips before she draws back. “Your father will never let you go that easily. I can’t make you give up your life here for what could be a life for me there. If I go then at least we won’t have to see each other.”

“I would give up anything for you,” he begs, his lips practically moving against hers as he chases her, trying to kiss her again. 

Ingrid withdraws. “No, Sylvain, you wouldn’t. We wouldn’t be here if that was true. I would never have forgiven you if that was true.”

“Would you stay? If I asked you to. If I told you I loved you. Would you stay?”

“I can’t stay,” she whispers. “I don’t know how to love you like this. You don’t know how to love me without lighting us both on fire.”

He laughs bitterly. “What about the others? Could they make you stay?”

“No.”

“You don’t like research. Why not stay and do something you love?”

“Because I can’t stay,” she says weakly. 

Her arguments are circling and Sylvain’s despair wells up so he kisses her again. They both taste like salt and bitterness and when Sylvain pulls back he drops her hands from her face. Her hands grab his shirt at his ribcage, but he reaches down and detaches them. He steps away and turns his head to the side. 

Dorothea had asked him yesterday if he thought she would come back. He hadn’t had an answer for her then, but he knows now. There’s nothing happy or healthy left in their relationship. It’s a toxic sore that’s killing them both slowly and it’s possessing every part of their lives. He doesn’t know how to run away. He’s never been good at that part.

Ingrid is good at running. 

Her phone buzzes again and Sylvain doesn’t look at her. She ignores it and touches his elbow. He steps away, drawing out of her touch. 

“You should answer it,” he says coolly. 

“Sylvain,” she says. 

He turns his back on her. “It’s been a long time coming. I guess you had that part right.” 

“Sylvain,” she says again, almost desperately. 

_Maybe she wants to stay. Maybe she wants you to fight for her_ , he thinks to himself. 

He doesn’t turn around, walking away from her. Her phone buzzes again. “Have a safe drive to Daphnel,” he says quietly. 

Sylvain walks out of the kitchen without looking back. He feels like he’s going to be sick. In their room, Ingrid’s bedside table is bare and the bed is made neatly. One of her drawers in the dresser is open and emptied. There are a few small things that she has left here and there, but they are things she would never use or want so he will probably just throw them out. 

Sylvain sits on the edge of the bed and stares at his hands. His ears are ringing, but he can just faintly hear her speaking on the phone in the kitchen, sounding much calmer than she had just moments ago. He’s not sure how long he sits on the bed, just listening as she moves around. The microwave beeps distantly and the door opens. There’s a voice that’s not Ingrid’s for a moment and then a louder shuffling noise before it closes. 

After that, the apartment is quiet. 

Sylvain leans back, sprawling out on the bed and staring at the ceiling. His phone is on the nightstand and he reaches for it. He almost dials her number on instinct alone, but instead, he calls Felix. 

Felix picks up partway through the first ring. “ _What the fuck do you want, Sylvain_?”

“She’s gone, Felix. For good this time.”

“ _Congratulations, you fucked up for good this time_ ,” Felix snaps and hangs up on him. 

Sylvain drops the hand holding his phone to the mattress and stares blankly at the ceiling. Of course, Felix has no sympathy for him right now. He has just gotten out of a nasty relationship with Dorothea and is still hopelessly in love with Annette. Felix doesn’t have sympathy for anyone right now. 

Even worse, Sylvain knows that in a week, Felix will blame him for Felix and Ingrid’s friendship deteriorating. He wonders if Ingrid will even tell anyone else that she’s leaving or if that will be up to him. He can’t decide what is worse. 

His stomach turns violently and Sylvain rolls off the edge of the bed, staggering into the bathroom. He lurches to the toilet and vomits up last night’s dinner. He heaves a few times once there’s nothing left in his stomach and it’s a horrible practiced instinct that has him rise from the crouch, rinse his mouth out at the sink, and brush his teeth quickly. 

Ingrid’s toothbrush is gone. 

It’s a logical thing to be gone, but Sylvain can’t help but stare at the place next to the sink where her toothbrush usually sat. The toothpaste tube is flattened at the bottom because Ingrid insisted that they always squeeze from the bottom. Morbidly curious, Sylvain opens the cupboard below the sink. 

Her small, minimalist box of make-up is gone. The extra toilet paper remains. Her hair ties and softball bows are missing. The box of condoms is tipped over, but present. Her tampon box is gone. His spare hair gel container has rolled to one edge of the cupboard, but it’s there.

Sylvain leans back, closing the cabinet. He falls back onto his ass on the bathroom floor and doesn’t have the energy to get up. He runs a hand through his hair and then over his face. No bruises, no scrapes, just puffy eyes from crying. 

He’s really gone and done it now, hasn’t he? She had handed him the match and he’s the one who had struck it and held it until it burned him to the ground.


	11. track 11: something wrapped all of my past mistakes in barbed wire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Ingrid straightens up and nods. “Thanks, Sylvain, for coming with me.”_
> 
> _He shakes his head. “I want to support you,” he reminds. “I don’t quite get the whole appeal of these conferences, but I know it’s important for you to impress people so you can pursue a Ph.D. later.”_
> 
> \- Sylvain gets jealous

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter exists for two reasons. I'll drop one in the endnotes and might drop previews for ch 12 if someone guesses the second reason~!
> 
> This is mostly SFAndi, with some dramatic flair...
> 
> **Track 11: invisible string**  
> 

_track 11: something wrapped all of my past mistakes in barbed wire_

* * *

_five and a half years ago_

* * *

Sylvain looks up from his phone as Ingrid walks into the room. She’s wearing a dark grey pencil skirt with a light green blouse tucked into it and carrying the matching blazer for the jacket in her arms. Her long hair is twisted into an elegant braided crown with a few strands peeping out around her face. She’s wearing more makeup than she normally dares to put on and she looks beautiful. 

He stands up and walks over to her. She gives him a nervous smile and he leans down to kiss her. Ingrid touches the side of his face tentatively as she kisses him back, but the second he tries to deepen the kiss she pushes him away. 

Sylvain pouts. “We have forty minutes before we need to leave.”

“No,” she says. “We have forty minutes until the conference starts. That means I need to be there in twenty minutes to set up.” She smooths out the lapel of his suit. “And if I give you an inch you’ll take a mile and I’ll have a hickey, no makeup left, and a need to redo my hair.”

Sylvain smirks at that. He can’t exactly deny it. They’ve been late to things before and they’ve had to do hickey checks after the one time that Dorothea found one on Ingrid and didn’t let either of them live it down for several months. 

“Fine,” he agrees. “But, you look beautiful.”

Ingrid blushes and fidgets with her skirt. “It’s not too much?”

He shakes his head. “It’s a professional conference, right?” She nods and he cups her face, running his thumb along her cheek. “Then you’re all good.”

Ingrid straightens up and nods. “Thanks, Sylvain, for coming with me.”

He shakes his head. “I want to support you,” he reminds. “I don’t quite get the whole appeal of these conferences, but I know it’s important for you to impress people so you can pursue a Ph.D. later.” 

He feels a bit like he’s reciting lines that Ingrid has fed him. Since she got into the honours biochemistry program in her second year, she’s been all about her future in post-graduate studies. Sylvain had graduated in April and he already has a job lined up with his father in politics and IR that starts next month in Fhirdiad. 

He and Ingrid have already decided to stay in their apartment in Fhirdiad because the express train is still the easiest thing for GMU students instead of trying to find housing in the really tiny city. Besides, Ingrid is taking some courses at the Fhirdiad campus so she only has to go to Garreg Mach twice a week. 

He takes her hand and she lets him twine their fingers together as he leads her to the door, snagging his keys and wallet on the way over. She picks up her purse and leans on him for balance as she pulls on plain black pumps. He holds her up until she’s steady on her own and then he leads the way out of the apartment.

* * *

The conference hall is crowded and Ingrid has to stay close to her poster, so she urges Sylvain to walk around instead of just hovering next to her and listening to her give her same one-minute pitch over and over again to the different visiting professors and professionals. 

He doesn’t understand much of what’s going on around him. He took one biology course in his first year of university to fill a science requirement and got out of there immediately afterwards, focusing on politics and economics courses. How Ingrid has chosen it as her major, even picking the hardest parts of it, he has no idea. 

He circles the conference hall three times just staring blankly and smiling politely at the different presenters. None of the posters mean anything to him except for the fact that he thinks Ingrid has one of the nicest ones of anyone here. He’s more than a little biased, but that’s okay. 

When he finally makes his return to Ingrid’s poster, she’s talking with a young man that can’t be any older than Sylvain. He has purple hair that’s neatly styled and shocking purple eyes that are crinkled at the edges as he smiles at Ingrid. Sylvain can read the man’s body language easily: he’s making himself open and friendly-looking, while also just coy enough to hold her attention. 

He’s flirting with her. 

Sylvain has to stop himself from approaching immediately. His jealous streak is nasty and he hates the way it looks on him. Ingrid always gets disappointed when he gets jealous. Today is all about Ingrid, so he really can’t afford to distract her or worse, embarrass her. Thankfully, she seems to be talking about her presentation, which gives him a bit of pause. 

He hovers nearby, keeping an eye on Ingrid and her mysterious, flirtatious friend, and watches Ingrid for any sign of discomfort. She finishes her little pitch and the man says something and her eyes get wide and her cheeks flush. Sylvain’s restraint snaps and he beelines towards them. 

“Hi, Ing,” he calls as he approaches, making sure that the other man hears him coming and hears the blatant familiarity in his tone. 

Her eyes dart to him. “Sylvain, um,” she pauses, looking at her guest. 

The man turns to Sylvain, giving him a practiced, polite smile. “Hello, I was just chatting with Ingrid about the statistical analysis she ran on the demographic data from her study. I’m Yuri.”

Sylvain smiles tightly, trying to push down the snarky part of him that wants to call out the other man for flirting with his girlfriend. “Right.” He bites his tongue to hold back and turns his attention back to his girlfriend who is looking increasingly worried at the interaction between Sylvain and Yuri. 

“Thank you for asking about my poster, Yuri,” she says politely. “I do have to decline your offer for drinks though,” her eyes slide to Sylvain as she watches his expression worriedly, “because I am in a relationship."

Yuri laughs lightly. “Of course, no worries at all.” He turns to Sylvain. “You’re a lucky man.”

Sylvain watches disappointment flicker across Ingrid’s face and he forces a smile. “I know.”

Yuri walks away and Sylvain makes sure he’s out of earshot before he looks at Ingrid, frowning. 

“What is it?”

She sighs and looks away from him, scanning around the conference hall again. “I’ll tell you later,” she says. Her eyes widen suddenly and she grabs his arm. “Oh no.”

Sylvain turns, following her gaze and sees two well-dressed young men with blonde hair and familiar green eyes walking towards them. He’s surprised to see them here because he didn’t think either of them lived in the city. Ingrid hastily drops his arm and plasters on a smile. 

“Rowan! Julian!” she greets as they approach. “What are you doing here?”

“Heard our little sister had a big conference today. We wanted to support you, Ingrid,” Rowan says. 

Rowan is the eldest of the four Galatea siblings and Julian is the second oldest. Sylvain is only a year younger than Gabriel, the youngest of the three brothers, but Julian is four years older than him and Rowan is seven. Sylvain smiles politely at the Galatea siblings and they seem to notice his presence.

“Little Gautier!” Julian says brightly. “What are you doing here?”

Ingrid cuts in before he can reply. “Sylvain’s my moral support and my ride.” Sylvain resists the urge to frown at her wording. “He’s here for the same reason as you guys, I guess, Jules,” Ingrid continues. 

Rowan looks past both Sylvain and Ingrid to Ingrid’s poster and he gestures to it. “So? Aren’t you going to give us the talk?”

Just before Ingrid can launch into it again, Sylvain touches her arm lightly. He knows what reaction he would normally expect from her and it isn’t the one he gets. She draws away from him immediately, turning wide green eyes onto him. He smothers the frown building up with a tight smile. 

“I’m going to go grab a drink,” he excuses himself and starts walking away, leaving Ingrid with her older brothers.

* * *

He only has the one drink, because he’s driving and his days of being a completely irresponsible idiot are long over, before Ingrid manages to find him. She’s carrying her poster sleeve and she’s smiling as she strides into the bar. Sylvain tries to bury his bad mood, but in the hour they’ve been apart it has only worsened. 

Apparently, he had done something that had made her upset earlier and she still hasn’t told her brothers that they’re dating even though they’ve been together for two years. 

She slides onto the stool at the bar next to him, leaning the poster tube against the bar, and flags down the bartender, ordering herself a gin and tonic. She turns to him and apparently immediately notes the sourness of his expression because her smile slips. 

“Sylvain?”

“How did the rest of the presentation go?” he asks, ignoring her prompt.

Her eyes narrow. “It went really well. What’s with you?”

He ignores her again. “How are Rowan and Jules?”

Ingrid finally winces and drops her gaze to the chipped bar counter where her drink rests. She spins her straw through it. “They’re good,” she says quietly. 

Sylvain bites the inside of his lip and looks away, feeling like an asshole again. “Sorry,” he apologizes quickly. “It’s not the right time for that conversation.”

Her eyes soften, but she doesn’t look at him again immediately, instead just taking a sip of her drink and nudging the poster tube at her feet a little so it rocks to one side and then back to the neutral position. 

“Can you tell me what the other thing I did was?” he asks suddenly, his desire to change the subject off of her brothers bubbling up. 

Ingrid hesitates, but she stops fiddling. “When I was speaking with Yuri, you devalued me,” she says quietly. “You came over as the boyfriend which redirected his attention to you.”

Sylvain opens his mouth to argue that it hadn’t been his intention, but she holds up a hand. 

“I know you didn’t mean to, but that doesn’t change the fact that you did. I knew he was flirting with me, Sylvain, and I also know that I love you. Didn’t you trust me enough to turn him down on my own?”

It’s not that he didn’t trust her, it’s more that he hates the idea that someday, maybe, Ingrid might not see the flirting and someone else might take advantage of that fact. He doesn’t know how to tell her that without demeaning her, so he awkwardly keeps his mouth shut and drops his gaze to the bar top. 

“Once the boyfriend bit was established, I lost him as an actual audience to my talk. I also might have lost a few other spectators who didn’t come over because there were already two people at the poster.” She presses her lips together, pausing, before she continues, “Sylvain, this is really important for me. This kind of presentation can make or break what kind of thesis supervisor I can get in the future.”

“Am I in this hypothetical future?” he asks before he can stop himself. Ingrid stares at him, looking shocked, and then he has to own up to his blabbermouth. “You talk a lot about a future in this field and this whole plan you have, but do you see me there with you?”

Ingrid’s expression is completely slack and there’s a flash of guilt before she gets it together and Sylvain turns his head away, frowning. He rolls his glass around on its rim, watching the half-melted ice cubes stick to the side of the glass before sliding around, following the motion of the spin. 

Her answer had been pretty clear. 

“Sylvain,” she says urgently, touching his arm. “I think about personal things and academic things differently,” she reminds. 

“Then why are you going into academia?” he asks. “You cry about your course load and school all the time. I see how miserable it makes you. Why do all of this and go into a field you’re not loving?”

Ingrid’s brow furrows. “I like biochemistry,” she argues weakly, but Sylvain knows first-hand from living with her that the subject has lost much of its lustre to Ingrid. 

He shakes his head. “You’ve set yourself this path where you graduate, go do a Ph.D., get a job as a prof and just do research and teaching forever. I know you don’t love the research part and you’ve never even mentioned teaching in all the time that I’ve known you, Ingrid. And I’ve known you for a long time.”

He definitely touches a nerve as he knuckles whiten around her glass. “And you’re following in your dad’s footsteps without a second thought, so I don’t think you should talk to me about career paths.”

Sylvain thinks about the news he received yesterday: his brother’s prison sentence. He had been going to tell her tonight after everything with the conference settled down, but now he’s not sure he wants to. He digs into his pocket for his car keys and places them on the bar next to Ingrid’s glass.

“You can drive yourself home, right?” he asks. 

Her eyes soften, the frustration seeping away. “Can’t we just go together?” She touches his leg lightly and Sylvain draws out of her touch. 

He doesn’t want to explode at her today. He’s done that too many times already and he doesn’t know if he can handle doing it again. He doesn’t want to talk about her family or his on the drive home, nor does he want to think about the man that had flirted with her. Sylvain stands up and doesn’t look at her. 

“I need some air. I’ll see you later,” he says quietly, heading out of the bar. 

He has a pack of cigarettes in his jacket pocket. While he normally wouldn’t dare smoke in nice clothing in case the scent clung, he is willing to make an exception to his rule today. He’s barely out of the building and out of the 2m radius by the doors before he’s pulling a cig out with his lighter and flicking the tip into the little flame. 

He walks as he smokes. He’s in no particular hurry, to smoke or to walk, so he just ends up wandering around the neighbourhood the conference hall is in. A beautiful woman smiles at him and Sylvain gives her a charming smile in return. Guilt knots in his stomach and he knows exactly what Ingrid would think right now, but his brain is buzzing and it won’t shut off. 

He doesn’t make it back to the apartment until late and he’s drunker than he had been before and half a pack of cigarettes lighter. Ingrid is asleep on the couch and Sylvain’s heart aches when he sees her because it’s painfully obvious that she had tried and failed to wait up for him.

He carries her to bed and tucks her under the covers, pressing a light kiss to the top of her head. Ingrid’s hand curls into his jacket and he has to pry it off so that he can strip out of his clothes and crawl into bed next to her. She turns into him, still asleep, and Sylvain lets his arm wrap around her. 

He strokes her shoulder lightly. “I don’t want to lose you,” he whispers to the quiet of their room. 

With Ingrid already asleep and her warm body pressed to his, it doesn’t take him long to fall asleep either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reason 1 why this chapter exists: Yuri.


	12. track 12: you made her like that

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Before she can look away, the young man’s head turns towards her and he pauses mid-step, his brow furrowing. Ingrid blinks, surprised, and he redirects towards her, tucking his hands into the pockets of his beautifully tailored coat._
> 
> _“Have we met before?” the young man says when he’s standing in front of her._
> 
> \- Ingrid makes a choice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This summary isn't ominous at all.... is it?
> 
> **Track 12: mad woman**  
> 

_track 12: you made her like that_

* * *

_present_

* * *

Ingrid waits on a park bench for Mercedes. She has wanted to talk to Mercedes for a while, but the other woman’s work schedule is busy and quite unforgiving. Still, Mercedes had said she worked an early shift today and would love to see Ingrid in the afternoon, so Ingrid is sitting in the park just down the street from the hospital, waiting for Mercedes’s shift to end. 

She considers pulling out her phone and texting Dorothea while she waits, but it’s cold and she doesn’t want to have her phone die too quickly thanks to the temperature. Instead, she tucks the lower half of her face into the blue scarf around her neck and curls her hands more deeply in her pockets. She quietly waits, just watching the people who are walking in the park. 

It had snowed the night before so there is a soft layer of white powder dusted across the park. Ingrid smiles to herself as she watches a family stroll by with two little kids that keep scooping up snow to hurl at each other. It reminds her of when she had been young and had done the same thing with her brothers and her friends. 

A group of young people strolls by her then, cutting off her view of the family and Ingrid almost doesn’t pay them any attention, but the hair of one of the men catches her attention. It’s violet in a familiar shade that makes her pause and wrack her brain as to why she knows that shade. It’s too pale for Lorenz and Bernadetta, but it’s irritatingly familiar. 

Before she can look away, the young man’s head turns towards her and he pauses mid-step, his brow furrowing. Ingrid blinks, surprised, and he redirects towards her, tucking his hands into the pockets of his beautifully tailored coat. 

“Have we met before?” the young man says when he’s standing in front of her. 

“You look familiar,” she admits. 

He smiles at her in a way that’s a little smug and reminds her an awful lot of Claude. “I’m Yuri, does that jog your memory?”

Ingrid stands up. “Wait, like Yuri who stopped to talk to me at that conference more than five years ago?”

Recognition flits across his face. “Well, if it isn’t the beautiful biochemist with the jealous boyfriend. It was Ingrid, right?”

She crosses her arms. “That’s right,” she agrees. 

Yuri smiles a little wider. “Pleasure to see you again.” His eyes dart around. “Any jealous boyfriend I should be watchful of this time?”

Ingrid’s good mood slips a bit and she tightens her crossed arms defensively. “No, we actually broke up a while ago.”

He winces. “Ah, sorry, didn’t mean to broach a sensitive subject.”

She shakes her head. “Like five years ago, a while, it’s alright.”

He raises an eyebrow. “I’m sorry. Leftover feels are messy for sure.”

She frowns. “What?”

He laughs. “Come on, you have the look. You’re still in love with your ex all these years later and you don’t know what to do about it.” He winks. “I know better than to put the moves on a girl who’s in love with someone else, I’ve gotten good at recognizing those kinds of things.”

“Hey! Yuri!” one of his friends yells, a buff dude with long dark hair. “Are you coming?”

Yuri takes a step away from her, giving her one last look up and down. “If it was a work thing, you’ll figure it out. If it wasn’t, then that’s just a shame,” he says casually as if he’s known her forever. “It was a pleasure to see you again, Miss Ingrid.”

Ingrid stays standing in front of the bench, watching in shock as Yuri turns and strides away from her like this was a perfectly normal interaction for two almost-strangers to have in a public park. She watches him and his friends walk away, laughing and kicking snow around. She laughs in disbelief and fidgets with the end of her scarf. 

“Figure it out, huh?” she mutters. 

“Ingrid!” 

Ingrid turns and sees Mercedes hurrying towards her. She’s wearing hospital scrubs under her winter coat and she has a yellow toque over her short blonde hair. Ingrid steps towards Mercedes and pulls her friend into a hug. Mercedes squeezes her tightly and then pulls back, holding her by the shoulders as she looks Ingrid up and down. 

“It’s good to see you,” Mercedes says pleasantly. “I was worried I might not get to see you again before you went back.”

Ingrid smiles weakly. “That would have been awful.”

Mercedes laughs warmly. “Come on, let’s walk! There’s a hot chocolate stand just a little ways from here.” She links her arm through Ingrid’s and tugs her onto the sidewalk. 

Ingrid laughs and lets her friend pull her along. When they fall into a comfortable step, she asks her question. “How was work?”

“Oh, it was good. It's been a little busy recently with all the ice-related injuries.” She giggles. “Lots of slips and scrapes, but no major incidents.”

Mercedes talks about her job like it’s the best thing in the world. She sounds happy and at ease and while her profession can be incredibly stressful, Ingrid knows that Mercedes wouldn’t trade it for the world. 

Ingrid slows to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk, dragging them both to a stop. Mercedes drops her arm and looks towards her, surprised. 

“Ingrid?”

“I hate my job,” she says aloud. The words are strange, but they’re not wrong. They’ve been bubbling inside of her for years. 

“Then quit,” Mercedes says simply. She says it like it’s the most obvious answer in the world and Ingrid stares at her. Mercedes pats her arm. “Ingrid, if you hate what you’re doing, then you shouldn’t be doing it.”

Ingrid frowns. “I just finished a Ph.D. Isn’t it a shame to give up on all of that now?”

“If you’re not happy, then, of course, it isn’t.” Mercedes tugs her forward again. “Why don’t you walk me through it? What do you hate about your job?”

Ingrid considers the question. “I don’t like research,” she says. “It’s tedious and there’s a lot of pressure placed on publication that I don’t enjoy.”

“What options do you have if you don’t publish?” 

“Not many. Most salaried positions have a certain number of required publications per lab per year. If I don’t publish, no lab will want me. I supposed I could look for a teaching position, but there aren’t really any in biochemistry that I’m interested in that I would be qualified for without publications to my name.” Ingrid presses her lips together. 

She’s had this perfectly laid out idea since she was seventeen years old of the path she had wanted to follow. She received her honours degree in biochemistry from GMU, her Ph.D. in cell cycle chemistry from U Daphnel, and she has the postdoc lab position that she’d dreamed about. And yet, she’s miserable. 

“What are you interested in?” Mercedes asks patiently. 

“I still like biology,” Ingrid says.

A young boy tears past them on the path, laughing loudly. The boy’s mother jogs by them, throwing a hasty apology back over her shoulder as she chases down her son. Ingrid smiles faintly. She likes kids. 

“I like kids and working with kids,” Ingrid continues. 

“Have you considered teaching?” Mercedes asks. “And not at the university level. Maybe high school biology?”

Ingrid thinks about it. Annette is a teacher and she loves her job. Maybe it’s not as prestigious as the world of professional academia, but it is honestly something that Ingrid can see herself doing and not hating. 

Ingrid pulls out her phone before she can talk herself out of it. She dials Judith’s number and waits a few seconds for her supervisor to pick up. 

“ _Hello, Ingrid, didn’t I say you were banned from the lab until the new year?_ ”

“Judith,” Ingrid starts, she looks at Mercedes who smiles encouragingly. “I need to quit,” she says. 

Judith is silent for a moment. “ _Fhirdiad help you figure everything out?_ ”

Ingrid pauses and taps her fingertip against the back of her phone. “Yes.”

“ _Look, Ingrid, you were a great student to me, but I could see your heart wasn’t in it. Since you got to Daphnel, your heart hasn’t been in it_.”

“You’re not disappointed?” Ingrid asks hesitantly. 

Judith had been a role model for Ingrid for years and she’s not sure she can handle her mentor being disappointed in her. 

“ _I’d be more disappointed if you came back in January and tried to act as if nothing had changed. I’ll email you a couple of forms so we can start the termination process._ ”

Ingrid exhales warily. “Right,” she mumbles. 

“ _Ingrid,_ ” Judith continues, “ _you should talk to your young man. If he’s anything like he was back when I met him, I think you two could be good for each other again_.”

Judith hangs up on her before she can dispute her mentor’s claim and Ingrid pulls the phone back from her face, staring at it. She laughs disbelievingly and looks at Mercedes who is still smiling at her. 

“Well, I guess that solves that problem,” Ingrid mumbles. 

Mercedes laughs. “That’s one way to do it,” she agrees. “Now what will you do? Are you going to go back to Daphnel anyways?”

“No,” Ingrid says and it’s as if a large weight lifts off her shoulders when she says it. “No, I want to stay. Everyone I care about is here and I can get a teaching certificate in a couple of years at Saint Cethleann College or at GMU’s Fhirdiad campus.” She smiles a little more confidently. “I want to stay.”

Mercedes hugs her tightly and Ingrid grips the back of her friend’s coat, still smiling foolishly. “We’re happy to have you stay,” Mercedes encourages. 

When they pull back out of the hug, Mercedes links their arms together again. Ingrid goes along with her as Mercedes ushers them towards a vendor in the park who is selling hot chocolate. They join the queue behind a teenage couple and Ingrid bites her lip. 

“I actually hadn’t planned on quitting my job today,” Ingrid says. “I actually had meant to ask you for advice on another area of my life.”

“Is it about Sylvain?” Mercedes asks. “Because I think I might know part of what happened already. He called me a few days ago.”

Ingrid flushes. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You still love him, don’t you?” Mercedes questions. “Because that will determine what route you should follow.” 

A snowflake lands on Ingrid’s arm and she looks up at the sky to see a few flakes starting to drift downward. She blinks as one catches in her eyelashes and starts to melt. 

“I do,” Ingrid says quietly. “But, I’m afraid. Sylvain and I self-destructed so badly when we were together, I don’t know if I can handle losing him again. I already feel like I was handed this golden opportunity to become friends with him again and I colossally messed that up.”

“Ingrid,” Mercedes says gently, “you and Sylvain are very different people than you were five, or even eight, years ago.”

“I know,” she says. “It makes me wonder what would have happened if we had never dated in the first place. If we still could have been friends.”

“If you still love him, don’t you owe it to yourself to try again?” 

Ingrid sighs. “He has grown so much and it feels like I don’t fit with him anymore. It’s like trying to force together two puzzle pieces that don’t match. He’s seeing a therapist, Mercie. He never would have admitted to needing therapy when we were together.”

“And you just changed your career path on a complete whim,” Mercedes counters. They step forward in the queue, closer to the vendor. “Maybe he’s not the same, but you aren’t either.”

Ingrid looks at Mercedes almost shyly. “You really think that we could try again?”

Mercedes squeezes Ingrid’s arm. “I think that you should talk to him. Talk about what hurt you both five years ago. See if you’ve managed those issues and see if either of you are in the right place to be trying again. If you are, then maybe you can try again. Or maybe you can just be friends again.”

Ingrid hums to herself. “What would I do without you, Mercedes?”

Mercedes laughs. “Probably a whole lot more worrying, Ingrid. But, don’t worry, I’m happy to help whenever I can. That’s what friends are for.”

Ingrid gets choked up suddenly and she rests her head against her friend’s shoulder, blinking back tears. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I should have been here for Annette and for Felix and for Dimitri and Byleth and Ashe and Dedue and you and Sylvain. I’m sorry I wasn’t.”

Mercedes’s cheek presses against her head. “Don’t apologize for something you can’t fix now,” Mercedes instructs. “Just be here now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the second reason I wrote chapter 11 as I did was to introduce Ingrid's complicated relationship with her work and her studies~


	13. track 13: and some things you just can't speak about

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Is now an okay time to talk?” she asks._
> 
> _He raises an eyebrow. “Talk?” Apparently the seriousness of her expression fills in the blanks because he drops his hand to his side. “Oh, you want to have_ that talk _.”_
> 
> \- The talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Five. Chapters. Remain.

_track 13: and some things you just can’t speak about_

* * *

_present_

* * *

Ingrid is tired of running. As soon as she and Mercedes finish their walk, she calls a cab to Sylvain’s apartment. She makes a very important call in the cab on the way there that ends way, way better than she had expected it too, considering the subject matter. She is jittery by the time the cab finally pulls over in front of his apartment building. 

She takes a deep breath and buzzes his apartment. He answers after a brief delay. 

“ _Hello?_ ”

“Sylvain? Is now an okay time?”

" _I_ _ngrid? An okay time for what?_ _You know what? I’ll just buzz you up._ ”

She takes a deep breath before heading into the elevator, pushing the button for the seventh floor. Sylvain is standing in his doorway, door open, staring at her as she walks down the hallway towards him. He looks good in a tight-fitted henley and jeans and Ingrid squares her shoulders as she approaches. 

“What do you need?” he asks curiously, resting a hand on the side of the doorframe. 

“Is now an okay time to talk?” she asks. 

He raises an eyebrow. “Talk?” Apparently the seriousness of her expression fills in the blanks because he drops his hand to his side. “Oh, you want to have _that talk_.”

“Is now okay?” she repeats quietly. “I don’t want to push it if it’s a bad time.”

He shakes his head. “No, I, uh, can do this. Come on.”

He pushes off, stepping into his apartment and Ingrid follows him in, dragging a few steps behind. Sylvain immediately heads to his countertop and picks up a whiskey tumbler. He takes a small sip and turns back towards her, noticing that she’s still standing in his doorway. 

“Drink?” he offers. 

“I called Gabe on the way here,” Ingrid says, ignoring the question. 

Sylvain freezes at the mention of her brother. “What? Why?”

“I told him we dated for almost three years. I told him that I lied to him and Jules and Rowan and dad for the entire time,” Ingrid says quietly. 

Sylvain is staring at her in complete shock. She’s a little surprised that he hadn’t dropped his glass entirely. He places his glass back down on the counter and rubs a hand over his face, looking completely blindsided.

“He told me that he knew,” she adds. “Apparently Jules and Rowan did too, but they were just waiting for me to tell them.”

“Why?” Sylvain questions, still standing across the room from her. 

She walks towards him, stopping about five feet away and she makes eye contact with him. She tries to keep her expression as calm and open as she can so that he knows she’s being genuine with him right now. 

“Because I should have told them back then. For you, I should have told them. And I’m sorry I didn’t.”

Sylvain crosses his arms. “Why are you here, Ingrid?”

“Because I was hoping we could talk about all the reasons we broke up. I wanted to start with that one because it was so unbelievably wrong of me to lie to my family and to force you to lie to them as well,” she explains. 

Sylvain’s guard drops a bit. “Can I ask why you never told them in the first place?”

Ingrid takes a deep breath. “Do you remember Elise, Rowan’s wife?”

Sylvain ponders for a second. “Yeah, the brunette one, right?”

“Yes,” Ingrid confirms. “They didn’t get married because they were in love. They got married because my father had Rowan marry Elise so that Elise’s father’s company would save my father’s company. He has tried to set Jules up with the sons of other businessmen just to forward and protect his business.” She takes a deep breath. “I couldn’t let him do that to you.”

Sylvain frowns. “Ingrid, we’d been friends since we were kids. Why was this any different?”

“Because you were Sylvain, my friend, then. You weren’t Sylvain Gautier, the rich son of the powerful Andre Gautier. That’s who you would have become to my family if my father had found out we were together. I was so afraid that you would hate me for it. That you would hate them for it.”

Sylvain strides towards her, stopping so that they are separated by only a foot. He hesitates, but then his arms come up and he pulls her into a hug, resting his chin atop her head. Ingrid stills, wondering if she is allowed to hug him back, but then he pulls back, holding her by the biceps. His eyes are glittering with unsaid sentiments. 

“Thank you for telling me that,” Sylvain says quietly. “I guess it’s my turn to share then, isn’t it?”

“You don’t have to,” she starts, but he shakes his head. 

“No,” he disagrees. “I should. But, come on.”

He takes her by the hand and tugs her over to the couch. She sits in one corner of it, leaning against the back and the armrest almost on instinct. Sylvain hovers for a second and then sits down. The space between them feels almost too great and Sylvain seems to notice it too as he leans towards her unintentionally. 

Ingrid reaches for him on some unspoken instinct and slides an arm around his neck. He leans down, twisting so that he can lie partly on top of her, his head resting against her stomach. She twines her fingers through his hair and strokes it slowly. They had laid like this more times than she could count when they were dating, but since their weird, probably messed up hook-up, she’s barely as much as touched him. 

“I talked to my father, you know,” he says. “Two years after you left, I was spiralling badly and Felix kind of bullied me into getting my shit together. I sat down with him and laid out all the reasons that he had fucked me up.”

Sylvain falls quiet for a moment and she strokes his hair wordlessly, trying to encourage him to continue opening up to her. 

“I’m pretty sure he almost disowned me right then, but I guess I said something right. I got myself a therapist a few weeks later and then my father reached out, saying that he wanted to try and fix things. He’s not perfect. He’s still the same stiff-board guy he’s always been, but he apologized for letting things with Miklan get as bad as they did.”

“That’s all he apologized for?” Ingrid asks, feeling a little hurt. 

“No,” Sylvain says quickly, shifting so that his chin digs into her stomach as he looks up at her. “He said that the way he treated you was despicable. He wanted me to apologize for him, but I hadn’t seen you in a few years by then.”

Ingrid lets out a breath she hadn’t even realized that she was holding in. Her fingers still in Sylvain’s hair and his brows knit.

“Am I horrible for not wanting to forgive him?” Ingrid whispers. 

“No,” Sylvain assures. “I don’t forgive him for what he did to you,” Sylvain promises. 

Ingrid relaxes. Sylvain finds her hand with his own and slides it out of his hair so that he can kiss her hand gently and then keep holding on to it. 

“You don’t have to forgive him for anything else that he did either,” Ingrid says. “You don’t have to give him that satisfaction.”

Sylvain laughs lightly. “I don’t forgive him,” he agrees. “But, I don’t want to lose him either. I have good memories of him too. He has to earn his forgiveness.”

Ingrid nods. “I’m proud of you.”

“You apologized to me,” Sylvain continues, “so I think it’s my turn.” 

He leans back before resituating so that he’s much closer to her face. Without thinking, Ingrid hooks her legs around him and pulls him in. His head settles in the crook of her neck and she presses her nose to his hair. 

“You don’t have to,” she says quietly. 

“I want to,” he counters. “I’m sorry that I let him treat you that way. I’m sorry I didn’t trust you more with Miklan. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you when you said I needed help. I’m sorry that I didn’t trust you with other things more.”

“That’s a lot of apologies,” Ingrid comments, still holding him. 

Her eyes are watering and it’s surprising to her how hard all of this feels. These words have been hanging between them for more than five years and it’s shocking how quickly they spill out once the conversation has started. Every word that drags out burns a little more and she nearly chokes on a couple of the harder confessions. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Daphnel as soon as I found out,” she says next. 

“I’m sorry I devalued you at that business event.”

The apologies come from both of them in a quiet back and forth. Their words and their breathing are the only sounds in Sylvain’s apartment. Ingrid is warm and comfortable pressed into the couch under Sylvain’s weight. It’s familiar and intimate, but not uncomfortable. 

Ingrid talks about her family and Sylvain listens with a small frown on his face, but when she’s done, he just cups her hand again and gives it a squeeze and they lie quietly for a moment, letting their breathing sync up. Then he talks about Miklan and the parole hearing that Ingrid hadn’t come back for and he quietly admits that he had wished she was there. Ingrid squeezes his hand and bites her lip as she whispers another apology. 

Finally, when it seems like the cracks between them all seem to have been traced and crossed and mended as best that can, Ingrid has one more card to play. 

“I called Judith today,” she says. 

Sylvain lifts his head and frowns. “What? Why?”

She brushes a lock of hair out of his face slowly and gently. “I quit.”

Sylvain shifts, propping himself up on his elbows on either side of her torso so he looks down at her with wide eyes. “Ingrid, you quit?” he echoes in disbelief. 

“You were right back then and you’re still right, you know,” she replies. “I don’t like research. I’m miserable in my field and I just couldn’t see past those childhood dreams I had. I just don’t want to be unhappy anymore.”

“What now?” 

She smiles, blinking away tears that gather in her eyes. “I don’t know,” she admits, laughing. “For the first time in my entire life, I have no idea what I’m going to do now.” Sylvain catches one of her hands and lowers himself back down so they’re pressed together again. She smiles. “I’m thinking I might get a teaching certificate,” she continues. “Or maybe I won’t.”

“Will you stay?”

It’s a heavy question. It could be him asking if she’s going to stay in Fhirdiad and stick around their friend group. It could be him asking if she’s going to stay in his life beyond whatever fleeting exchanges they’ve had in the last month. It could be him asking her to stay tonight in his apartment in the quiet intimacy of the space they’ve created. 

Ingrid’s hand traces across the top of Sylvain’s cheekbone tentatively. His gaze shifts from something curious to something much more intense, but he doesn’t kiss her. She’s grateful and disappointed in the same moment.

“As long as I can,” she replies. 

His gaze softens again and he lowers his head back against her shoulder, breathing lightly on her neck. Ingrid tightens her arms around him and takes a deep breath, breathing in the sweet scent of his cologne and the tenderness of the moment. 

“Stay,” he says quietly. “You should stay.”

“Okay,” she says. 

It’s the last word that lingers between them until they both drift off to sleep. Ingrid sleeps better half crushed by Sylvain than she has in what feels like five years. She wakes up to Sylvain’s nose still pressed against her with a small smile on his face while he sleeps. She doesn’t adjust her hands on him, afraid of disturbing him, but she does smile faintly at him. 

_Maybe there’s something here still_ , she thinks quietly. _Maybe he’ll still love me too._


	14. track 14: but i know i miss you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I’ll walk with you,” Sylvain offers suddenly._
> 
> _Ingrid blinks at him. “You don’t have to.”_
> 
> _He shrugs at her and stands up off the couch, brushing his hands off on his jeans. “It’s cool. I’m heading the same way.”_
> 
> \- Ingrid puts it together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hmm... rating...
> 
> **Track 14: betty**

_ track 14: but i know i miss you _

* * *

_ present _

* * *

Byleth and Dimitri’s apartment is overcrowded with all of the former Blue Lions gathered around, but it feels like home. Everyone is laughing and drinking and smiling and Ingrid feels lighter than she has in weeks. 

After she and Sylvain had their big talk about everything that had gone wrong in their relationship, they’d fallen asleep together. The next morning had only been marginally awkward, but it had been saved by Sylvain cooking Ingrid breakfast and them slipping into some silly argument that reminded her a lot of back when they had roomed with Felix and Dimitri when she was 18. 

He’d driven her back to Dorothea’s apartment and invited her to the monthly game night at Byleth and Dimitri’s in a few days. Ingrid had almost declined the invitation, but Sylvain seemed earnest and genuine enough about the fact that they would both be fine so she accepted it. 

Felix hands her a new beer and Ingrid smiles at him. “Thanks.”

Currently, the group is waiting for the conclusion of a Monopoly Game. Ashe and Annette had quickly been driven to bankruptcy by Sylvain and Byleth’s ruthless strategic plays and now the two were facing down. People are taking sides and Ingrid is just enjoying neutrality with Felix, sipping on her second beer. 

She leans towards Felix as Sylvain rolls the dice for his turn. “Will this ever end? I don’t see either of them admitting defeat easily.”

Felix rolls his eyes. “Byleth won last time, so this is Sylvain trying to defend his reputation.”

She laughs. “Does he still practice chess against the computer?”

“Last I heard he and Claude actually had a weekly online game,” Dedue says, walking over to them. 

Ingrid claps a hand over her mouth to smother the laugh that tries to escape. “Of course they do. Do they take bets?”

Dedue raises an eyebrow. “Betting on Sylvain?”

She laughs. “No, against him, naturally.”

Dedue’s lips twitch into an amused smile. “Of course.”

Ingrid’s attention is drawn back to the kitchen table when Byleth cheers. She turns and sees Sylvain moping as he forks over his last bits of cash to Byleth after landing on one of her most expensive properties. She steps over to Sylvain’s side and looks down at the board, taking another sip. 

“Is this finally over then?” she asks. 

Byleth smirks. “I believe that should be bankrupt, Mr. Gautier, is it not?”

Sylvain pouts and Ingrid has to hide a small, affectionate smile. “Right,” he grumbles. He runs a hand through his hair and Ingrid pats his shoulder without thinking. 

Byleth’s eyes follow the motion curiously and then she raises an eyebrow at Ingrid’s face. Ingrid quickly retracts her hand and notes Byleth’s empty glass. 

“Drink, Byleth?” she offers. 

Dimitri stands up from next to his fiancée. “I can get it,” he says. 

Byleth shakes her head, reaching out to squeeze his hand. “No, it’s okay, Dimitri, I got it.”

She picks up her glass and walks around the table, sliding her arm through Ingrid’s as she does. Byleth guides them into the kitchen away from Sylvain and Dimitri. Ashe and Mercedes are chatting by the stove, but Mercedes picks up on the conversation that is about to happen and she redirects Ashe towards the living room. 

Byleth places her glass on the counter. “So you two have figured it out?”

Ingrid shrugs. “I don’t know, honestly. We talked it out and I think we’re going to try to be friends again. I’m going to be around now as you know, so we might as well.”

Byleth reaches out and hugs her, careful not to cause Ingrid to spill her drink. “I’m glad,” she says. “You guys were really good friends before everything, so I hope you get some of that normalcy back.”

Ingrid pats Byleth’s back. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Plus it means I can be here without it being weird.”

Byleth laughs. “That’s always a nice bonus. We’ve missed having you around."

* * *

A few chaotic, fun hours pass and Ingrid has a few more beers until it is really late and she is suitably tipsy. Mercedes, Dedue, Annette, and Felix have already left, leaving just Byleth, Dimitri, Ashe, Sylvain, and herself in the apartment. 

Ashe holds up his phone, his screen lit up with a text. “Petra’s here,” he says. “I should run.”

Ingrid stretches her hands above her head. “I should head out too,” she agrees. “I’m just walking to the subway. It goes right to Dorothea’s place.”

“I’ll walk with you,” Sylvain offers suddenly. 

Ingrid blinks at him. “You don’t have to.”

He shrugs at her and stands up off the couch, brushing his hands off on his jeans. “It’s cool. I’m heading the same way.”

He isn’t. She knows that he isn’t. His apartment is in the opposite direction of the underground station. Still, there’s something in his gaze that makes her pause and she nods. 

“Okay.”

* * *

They say goodbye to Ashe when they reach the street level and he disappears into a car driven by his girlfriend. Ingrid puts on her gloves, but her hands are still cold so she shoves them into her pockets and watches Petra’s car drive away on the dark street for a moment. 

It’s  _ freezing _ outside and she’s eager to get to the subway so that she can be warm. Sylvain doesn’t seem to share her displeasure regarding the cold, but he does keep his hands in his pockets to hide them from the cold air. 

They walk silently down the streets, dodging icy patches on the sidewalk and admiring the glint of the streetlights in the snow. When they’re across the street from the subway station, Ingrid turns to look across the street for traffic, but Sylvain grabs her arm. 

“Ingrid,” he says, his voice quiet, but serious. 

A car drives by and Ingrid steps back from the edge of the road, distracted from Sylvain for a moment. She turns to him and her breath catches. He’s silhouetted by the streetlight behind them and his expression is fond but almost sad at the same time. 

“There will never be another you, Ingrid,” Sylvain says quietly. 

She stares at him, eyes wide and hands clenched in her pockets. Their breaths curl in the air between them and Sylvain’s nose is pink from the cold. His eyes are soft and the way that he looks at her makes her heart flip. It’s like they’re two stupid kids again trying to pretend that they’re just friends.

And, Ingrid realizes belatedly, that’s exactly what they are. 

She steps closer to him, pulling her hands from her pockets. She touches his chest with one gloved hand and Sylvain stills, holding his breath. His heart thrums under her touch and Ingrid smiles softly. She inches closer so that their shoes brush together and she raises her other hand to his face. 

“There has never been another you, Sylvain,” she replies quietly. 

Under the spotlight of the streetlight, his red hair looks almost orange as he leans in slowly, waiting for her to back away or to run off on him and leave him alone. Ingrid is done running. She leans up on her tiptoes, pressing their lips together gently. Sylvain pushes against her, bending to her height as an arm curls around her waist. 

Ingrid basks in his warmth as she hooks her arm around his neck, keeping him close to her as their lips move together slowly. His lips are warmer than they should be as they move against hers, gently parting to deepen the kiss. Ingrid hums into him and grips his jacket with the hand on his chest. 

Sylvain pulls away from her but doesn’t let her go, just staring down at her with wide brown eyes and an unreadable expression on his face. Ingrid holds onto him tightly, staying in his space, and waits for him to get his words together. 

“I’m still in love with you,” he says quietly. 

In the cool night, his words are the only thing she hears and she smiles, tugging on his coat. 

“I love you,” she replies simply. 

It’s the first thing about the last month and a half that has felt easy. Everything she has done recently: coming back to Fhirdiad, reconnecting with friends, quitting her job, has felt impossible. Holding Sylvain on the sidewalk in the middle of the freezing night is the easiest thing she’s ever had to do. 

Sylvain kisses her forehead and tugs her into a hug. He rocks them back and forth and Ingrid laughs, resting her head against his chest. She feels safe with him. That much hasn’t changed in all the time she has known him. Now she just feels more ready to fight for him: fight his father, fight her instincts, fight every stupid future plan she had laid out for herself. 

“I don’t want you to leave,” he says into her hair as he presses his face against it as he holds her. 

Ingrid slides her arm from his chest so that she’s hugging him and she twists so that she can look up at him. He looks conflicted, so she leans up and presses a faint kiss to his lips. She smiles at him when she pulls back. 

“Then I’m not leaving,” she promises. 

“Come home with me,” Sylvain begs.

Ingrid disentangles their hug but catches his hand before he can retreat. She pulls him back down the street away from the subway station. He’s dead weight behind her, watching her like he can’t believe what’s happening. 

“Take me home, Sylvain,” she says to him in the darkness of the night.

* * *

This time, the moment they step into his apartment, Sylvain twists, pressing her body back against his door, leaning his weight against her. He kisses her hard, but like he’s in no particular hurry. Ingrid’s toes curl in her boots and her cheeks warm as she meets his kiss with matched energy. 

He grabs her hands in his own, peeling back her gloves. Ingrid smiles into the kiss and twists her hands free, dropping her gloves to the ground. Next, Sylvain sets himself to work on her coat, popping her buttons open one by one before he pushes it back over her shoulders and she drops her arms down, letting the coat tumble to the ground. 

Ingrid returns the favour, dragging down the zipper on his coat. Sylvain barely pauses in his efforts to undress her to strip out of his coat and Ingrid breaks the kiss for air, laughing. She catches his hands where they’ve fisted in the material of her sweater. 

“Woah,” she teases before he can pull it up. 

Sylvain stills, looking down at her. “Is this okay?”

She places a hand against his stomach and pushes him back. He steps back and she follows, slipping a hand under his shirt against the bare skin of his stomach. Sylvain’s confusion turns to smugness as she draws his shirt up. He stops his retreat to pull it over his head, dropping it onto the chair next to him. 

He catches her hips to stop her advance. “Ingrid?” he asks again.

She steps on his toes and pulls his lips back down to hers. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, it’s okay.”

He doesn’t hesitate then, gripping the hem of her sweater and forcing it up. Ingrid lifts her arms for him and he pulls it over her head. Almost instantly afterwards, his head dips and his lips seal against the side of her neck. Ingrid sighs and tangles her fingers in his hair. 

Sylvain seems content to kiss and suck at the sensitive skin of her neck and it’s only after she feels the light scrape of teeth that she snaps back to her sense and she tugs on his hair, displeased. 

“Marks!” she grumbles. 

He laughs and kisses her collarbone. “Too bad for you,” he teases. 

Ingrid rolls her eyes and pulls his head back by the hair. His eyes are glittering, amused, and his hands wander down her side, cupping her hips and butt. He kisses her lips again and Ingrid pushes him back, following in the kiss as she tries to steer him towards his bedroom. 

Sylvain laughs at her and drops his hands to her thighs, lifting her up suddenly. She jumps, assisting him, and wraps her legs around his hips. Sylvain walks them into his bedroom and drops her inelegantly onto her back on the bed. He follows her down, trapping her between his hands as he kneels between her hips. 

Ingrid’s head tilts back as Sylvain undresses her, removing her bra and her jeans, his hands taking liberties as he does so. He kisses along her shoulder and down across her chest and Ingrid grips his sheets when she feels his tongue on her stomach. 

There’s nothing hurried about his exploration. It’s very different from the last time they had sex where they were frenzied and drunk and pretending like all of their issues were gone and unimportant. Now, Sylvain touches her like she’s a precious treasure he has earned through their discussion of the true failings in their original relationship. 

He touches her like he loves her.

Ingrid is reduced to a gasping mess twisting in his sheets much sooner than she had thought she would be, but Sylvain is incredibly pleased with himself when he leans back to let her catch her breath, his fingers dancing along the sides of her ribcage. 

She touches his cheek gently and then his hands drift and she gasps again. He laughs before withdrawing and shuffling the rest of his own clothes off. Ingrid, taking the advantage where she sees it, rolls him onto his back and grins down at him. Sylvain’s eyebrows raise at her blatant challenge, but he lets her explore him with her mouth and hands as she touches the grooves of his chest and stomach before dipping below his waist. 

It’s his turn to be breathless as she falls into an old but still wonderfully effective pattern. It doesn’t take him long to get annoyed with her, rolling her back onto his back. He stops then, leaning over her with both of their chests heaving as they stare at each other. 

“You’ll stay?”

“I’ll stay,” she promises. 

He lowers himself against her slowly and Ingrid tugs at his hair. 

“I love you,” she gasps. 

His own admission is muffled by the gasps that follow, but she feels it in the way that he moves. They don’t need any more words for the rest of the night.


	15. track 15: all these people think love's for show

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Sylvain, people are looking at us,” she whispers._
> 
> _He smiles, keeping his head up and meeting the gaze of anyone that seems particularly interested by him and his girlfriend. As soon as his eyes fall upon them, they look away like they’re ashamed._
> 
> \- Sylvain tries to balance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The outrage and distrust filling the comment box is the driving force behind my daily updates. You're welcome.
> 
> **Track 15: peace**  
> 

_track 15: all these people think love’s for show_

* * *

_six years ago_

* * *

“Sylvain, I don’t want to do this,” Ingrid says. She fidgets with the hem of her dress and Sylvain grabs her hand. 

“Hey, Ingrid, it’s going to be okay,” he tries to assure. 

She sighs and tugs her hand free, covering her face. Sylvain twines a beautifully curled strand of her hair around one of his fingers before pressing a kiss to the top of her cheekbone. He wraps his arms around her and pulls her into his chest. Ingrid’s hands quickly grip his suit jacket. 

“I’m terrified, Sylvain,” she mumbles. 

“And you have no reason to be. You’re going to be amazing. My father knows you and nobody else there is really going to care who I am, much less who you are. You’re putting a lot of pressure on this that doesn’t need to be there.”

She sighs. “There’s a difference between your father knowing me as your friend and knowing me as your girlfriend.”

Sylvain laughs and kisses the top of her head. “Well, you look amazing and I love you, so I don’t think anything else matters.”

Ingrid huffs, but she stands a little straighter so he counts it as a win.

* * *

The hotel is bustling with people dressed in extremely expensive dresses and suits. Sylvain drives up to the front of the building and he sees Ingrid’s knuckles whiten in her lap as she clenches her hands. 

It had been one battle to get Ingrid to agree to come to his father’s charity event with him. It had been a whole different one to get her to agree to wear the ridiculously expensive dress he had bought her. 

The dress is beautiful, and it suits her very well, but it is not something Ingrid would ever, _ever_ wear of her own volition. It costs nearly as much as the rent for their apartment for a month. Sylvain hadn’t even hesitated to buy it for her using the funds his father had given him, but Ingrid hadn’t talked to him for an entire day afterwards because she was so upset with him. 

Sylvain knows that she doesn’t like it when he throws around his father’s money, but in the case of buying something worthy to wear to his father’s ridiculously expensive charity function, it had been the best option. Sylvain had never been going to let Ingrid try and scrounge up the money to find something for the event when he had been the one to invite her. 

He stops the car in front of the hotel and almost immediately a valet is opening the door, letting him out of the car. Sylvain steps out and there’s a bright flash from a camera. It’s blinding and surprising because his father is usually better about letting paparazzi gather outside of his events. 

Sylvain quickly rounds the car and helps Ingrid out. She looks like a deer in headlights under all of the stares of the photographers so Sylvain drops his hand to her lower back and just ushers her into the lobby. He keeps his hand on her back until they reach the bouncer for the partitioned area of the hotel for the gala. 

He smiles politely at the bouncer and pulls the invitation out of his coat pocket, handing it over. They’re waved through and Sylvain offers Ingrid his arm. She takes it, her hands gripping his jacket so tightly that he’s almost worried she’ll tear it. 

“Sylvain, people are looking at us,” she whispers. 

He smiles, keeping his head up and meeting the gaze of anyone that seems particularly interested by him and his girlfriend. As soon as his eyes fall upon them, they look away like they’re ashamed. 

“It’s not usually like this,” he admits, escorting her through the crowd. 

“Do you think it’s because of Miklan?”

Miklan had been arrested a few days after sending Sylvain to the hospital just over a month ago. Sylvain had finally come clean to his father about all of the shit that Miklan kept trying to pull and Andre’s response had been to immediately have Miklan arrested and disinherited. There had been a complete media circus for about two weeks following Miklan’s arrest since the reasons for it were never disclosed thanks to his father’s team of highly efficient lawyers. 

Sylvain had been hoping that the attention around the incident would have died down by this point, but given the stares that kept drifting towards him and Ingrid, that seemed unlikely. He squeezed Ingrid’s hand in an attempt to reassure her and just kept walking them towards the far side of the room where he knew his father would be.

“Yes,” he replies to Ingrid quietly as they step around a man who Sylvain thinks is a Sreng politician. 

He spots his father then, with his mother hanging off his arm like a piece of jewelry. They’re both sharply dressed and his father looks shockingly at ease despite the pressure that this event places on him. They’re talking to a sharply dressed man who looks vaguely familiar to Sylvain, but it isn’t until he sees Dimitri’s step-sister Edelgard in the man’s shadow that he realizes who it is. 

“That’s Volkhard von Arundel,” Sylvain says to Ingrid as they approach. “He’s Edelgard’s uncle.”

She doesn’t get a chance to reply before Sylvain’s mother spots them, a smile lighting up her face. “Sylvain!” 

She disentangles herself from his father and rushes towards him, pulling him down and kissing both of his cheeks. Sylvain extracts his arm from Ingrid’s grip and politely hugs his mother who has never hugged him if there wasn’t an audience to watch. 

“Hello Mother,” he greets politely. 

She leans back, smiling at him. She has short blonde hair done in elaborate curls and beautiful red-toned make-up that matches her designer red dress which is, of course, perfectly colour matched to his father’s hair and the pocket square on his suit. Her brown eyes flick over Ingrid and she smiles sharply.

“Ingrid, darling, how are you?”

“I’m well, thank you. It’s an honour to be here today,” Ingrid replies, her words polite and measured. 

Sylvain’s mother smiles and pulls Ingrid into a hug too and Sylvain glances at his father and sees the wave his father beckons him with. Reluctantly, he leaves Ingrid with his chatty, socialite mother as he approaches Edelgard, his father, and Edelgard’s uncle. 

“Volkhard, Edelgard, Father,” Sylvain greets. 

Edelgard gives him a tight smile and adjusts her lilac dress over her hips a bit. Her gaze darts to Ingrid and she looks almost uncomfortable. A frown creeps onto Sylvain’s face and he turns to his father. 

“Beautiful event as always, Father,” he says lightly.

His father smiles at him in a way that is cuttingly familiar. Sylvain knows that he looks like his father, everyone seems so determined to tell him that time after time. “Sylvain, thank you for joining us. I’m sure you and Edelgard are well acquainted.”

Sylvain and Edelgard exchange awkward smiles. They are well enough acquainted through Dimitri that this is definitely not their first meeting, but they’re certainly not friends in any stretch of the word. 

“Yes, we’ve met,” Sylvain agrees. 

“I’m sure you know how well accomplished she is then. Already on the pre-law track and just two years younger than you,” Sylvain’s father advertises openly. 

Sylvain and Edelgard figure it out at the same moment. Edelgard’s eyebrow twitches and Sylvain frowns, turning to see that Ingrid and his mother have just rejoined the conversation. The tiny smile on Ingrid’s face slips as she makes eye contact with him. 

“Father,” Sylvain says shortly, “you know my _girlfriend_ , Ingrid, right?”

His father’s eyes harden and he gives Ingrid his shark-like smile. “Of course I know Miss Galatea.”

“Well, it was lovely to see you again, Edelgard,” Sylvain says, reaching for Ingrid’s hand. She almost dodges his grip, but Sylvain just wraps an arm around her and ushers her away from his father. 

He’s fuming by the time that they reach a refreshment table. Ingrid is silent next to him as she picks up a glass of white wine. 

“I can’t believe him,” Sylvain growls.

Ingrid, who is normally so on board with bashing his father, is uncharacteristically quiet. Sylvain looks at her and sees the pain in her eyes as she tries to avoid his gaze. Sylvain frowns, his anger dissolving to give way to worry. 

“Ingrid?”

She takes a short, shaky breath. “I just,” she hesitates, “I need a minute.”

Sylvain picks up a tumbler of some expensive whiskey and leads Ingrid towards one of the patio doors at the rear of the hotel. He shoots a hard look at a pair of socialites who seemed to have been intending to follow them. They stop short at the look on his face, pivoting and walking away. 

Sylvain guides Ingrid out onto the patio and she almost immediately starts pacing. He leans against a nearby table and frowns as Ingrid paces. It’s only when he notices that she seems to be getting more agitated that he steps in, cutting her off and grabbing one of her hands with his free hand. 

“Ingrid,” he says. “What’s wrong?”

She leans forward until her forehead rests against him and takes in a shaky breath. “Why is your father trying to set you up with Edelgard?”

Sylvain frowns and tucks a strand of her hair back. “I don’t know, but I’m not interested.”

Ingrid leans back suddenly. “Does he do this often?”

“What? Set me up with Dimitri’s step-sister?”

“Try to set you up,” she corrects. “Edelgard comes from a rich and influential family. A match between you two would be incredibly beneficial for your family name.”

Sylvain’s frown deepens. He takes Ingrid’s wine glass from her and turns, placing both of their drinks on the nearby table. He turns back to her and cups her face in his hands, kissing her forehead. 

“My father can do whatever he pleases. You’re my girlfriend. I love you and that’s not going to change.”

She tries to look down and Sylvain drops her face, catching her hands instead. 

“Ingrid,” he tries.

“Sylvain, your father controls almost everything about your life. Do you really think he’s not going to try and exercise some control over your relationships as well?”

Sylvain tenses. “I’m an adult man, Ingrid. My father does not control my life.”

She bites her lip and averts her gaze. Her avoidance is typical and annoying, but now is not the right time to get angry with her. They really can’t cause a scene here because that is just more drama in his family name and more reason for his father to keep butting into his life. 

Ingrid is, unfortunately, right though when she had guessed that his father has tried to set him up in the past. Sylvain had gotten away from most of the previous attempts using the trashy reputation he had built for himself in high school, but once he hit university and realized that he was truly in love with Ingrid, he had cleaned up his act even before they had started dating. That did mean, however, that his father’s attempts only grew more numerous and successful. 

Still, Sylvain is dating Ingrid. He’s in love with Ingrid and he’s not going to let his father push him around like he might try to.

Someone coughs behind them and Sylvain turns to see Edelgard standing just outside the patio door, holding a plate of appetizers. She smiles weakly. 

“Hi.”

Ingrid straightens and steps away from Sylvain. “Hi, Edelgard.”

Edelgard holds out the plate. “I, uh, wanted to apologize. I didn’t know your father and my uncle would try something like that.”

Sylvain sighs. “You don’t have to apologize for my father, Edelgard.”

She smiles sympathetically. “I know what it’s like to have those kinds of expectations though.”

If he remembers correctly, Edelgard is the sole heir in line to take over her father’s massively successful law firm. Sylvain reaches out and takes the plate of food, offering it to his girlfriend. Ingrid hesitantly takes it, but she doesn’t eat anything on it right away, a sign to Sylvain that she’s definitely still upset. 

He presses his lips together and forces himself to make pleasant conversation with Edelgard for a few minutes before she makes an excuse to disappear back inside. Sylvain turns back to Ingrid who has finally nibbled on some of the delicacies on the plate. 

“We should go back inside,” Ingrid says quietly. 

Sylvain’s brows knit. “Ingrid.”

“We don’t want to cause a scene, Sylvain,” she says and then brushes past him, scooping up her wine glass on the way back inside.


	16. track 16: you have beaten my heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I’m going to go back to Daphnel,” Ingrid says next._
> 
> \- Ingrid takes leave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok so when I originally started this fic, I was like, weekly updates at most. This is fine. And then....Mish and I got into a posting war. 
> 
> and then I'd committed. 
> 
> and now I can't stop. 
> 
> I have a busy today and tomorrow so I'm unsure if I'll finish 17 tomorrow, but I would love to try. These chapters are short since they average around 2-2.5k words each, but it's still something I'm shocked I've managed to balance. 
> 
> Anyways, don't worry about the summary. _Everything is fine_.
> 
> **Track 16: hoax**   
> 

_track 16: you have beaten my heart_

* * *

_present_

* * *

Ingrid wakes up before Sylvain. Her head is resting on his bare chest and their arms are wrapped around each other. One of her feet is trapped between his legs and Ingrid wriggles, trying to pull it free. Sylvain mumbles something in his sleep, tightening his grip on her.

She smiles faintly and twists so that she's looking down at him. She brushes aside a strand of his hair. She curls it loosely around her finger as she studies his expression as he sleeps. He looks peaceful and more relaxed than she has seen him in a long, long time. 

Even back when they were dating, Sylvain had carried incredible weights on his shoulders that Ingrid had never been able to relieve at all. Now, he looks years younger than 29. It’s nice to see him this way.

Ingrid untangles their limbs slowly, careful not to wake him, and grabs one of Sylvain’s shirts off of his dresser and pulls it on. It falls down to her thighs and she smooths it out before making her way to Sylvain’s bathroom. She runs some water and scrubs her face and uses the toilet, taking her time. 

She doesn’t think anything of her little escape until she reenters the bedroom and sees Sylvain sitting up on the bed, facing away from her, his head in his hands. Ingrid blinks and stops short, watching him in surprise. Guilt twists in her stomach as she realizes what he had assumed her absence meant. 

“Sylvain,” she calls quietly. 

His head snaps towards her. His hair is wild and sticks up in every direction and Ingrid climbs onto the bed, crawling across it towards him. Sylvain twists, propping a leg up so that he can turn most of the way back to face her. She reaches for one of his hands and he grabs at the shirt she’s wearing with his other hand. 

“It’s okay,” she tries to assure. 

He pulls her closer until he can press his head down against her shoulder. His hands are trembling. 

“I thought you left,” he mumbles. 

“No, of course not,” Ingrid disagrees. 

It’s hard not to see where his uncertainty comes from. She has had more than a few issues with running away from her problems, including having run out on him the morning after once already in the last month. She cups the back of his head and presses a kiss to her temple. 

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs. 

Sylvain exhales warily. “You shouldn’t have to apologize for this.”

Ingrid tugs his head back from her shoulder and frowns at him. “Sylvain, it’s okay to be anxious about things.”

He laughs faintly. “God, how I wish I’d known that when I was younger.”

Sympathy swells in Ingrid and she tugs on his arm, pulling him back onto the bed. She pushes him down against the mattress and crawls half on top of him. His arms wrap around her waist instinctively, fingers curling into the material of his shirt. 

She kisses his collarbone. “Hey, I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”

Sylvain’s chest heaves with a sigh. “Sorry, I know I should be able to take you at your word, but I’m still struggling.”

Ingrid laughs and pats his chest. “No, that’s on me. I ran out on you last time and I spent our entire relationship running away from you.”

Sylvain’s hands bunch up the material of her shirt. “What are we doing, Ingrid?”

She twists, propping herself on one elbow. “I love you,” she says. “I don’t know what you want, Sylvain, but if you’ll have me, I’d like to try again.”

“Try again?” He looks conflicted for a moment before his eyes soften. “I love you too, Ingrid, and I want you to stay.” He reaches up to push some of her hair behind her ear, his thumb lingering on her cheek. “I want to try again.”

She smiles. “We’ll have to be better,” she says. 

Sylvain nods. “Talk to me, okay?”

She kisses him lightly. “Okay. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk to me either. We’re better than we were.”

Sylvain cups the back of her head and kisses her a little more firmly. “I trust you, Ingrid. We’ll work on it.”

His hands slide the shirt she had stolen up over her hips and she laughs, rolling and pulling him on top of her. Breakfast can wait.

* * *

An hour later, Ingrid and Sylvain finally emerge to grab the food that Ingrid had ordered over delivery since Sylvain claims his kitchen is apparently empty. They do eat in the kitchen, despite Ingrid almost wanting to bring the food to the couch or even back to bed. Instead, they sit next to each other at the bar counter and eat eggs and bacon and toast. 

“Hey,” Sylvain says, nudging her with his elbow. 

Ingrid lowers her fork and tilts her head, questioning. “What?”

“Well, you’re Ingrid, so I’m guessing you have a plan with how you want to move forward, right?”

Ingrid blinks and suddenly feels awkward. “Actually, I honestly haven’t thought about any of this.”

Sylvain laughs. “That’s got to drive you nuts.”

She reaches for his hand, squeezing it. “It has enough benefits that I’ve been well-distracted.”

He smirks and she immediately drops his hand, shoving his shoulder before he even gets the words out. 

“Well-distracted? You’re welcome,” he says smugly.

Ingrid huffs, but she’s not actually annoyed with him. “Shut up.”

“Are you going to get a place in Fhirdiad?”

Ingrid spins her fork across the styrofoam of the take-out container, pondering. She has thought about this much at least. She has been planning on looking for a tiny matchbox apartment near the GMU Fhirdiad campus so she can look into getting her teaching certificate without breaking the bank on a nice apartment. 

“I think so,” she says.

“Or you could just move in with me,” Sylvain counters.

Ingrid bites her lip and doesn’t look at him. “Sylvain, I don’t know if that’s the best idea. We’ve only just started to work out all of our shit. It’s going to take a lot more work than a few apologies and a few rolls in the sheets.”

He reaches out and spins her chair, rotating her towards him and the sympathetic, loving look on his face. “Ingrid, we’ll work on it. It’s not worth you getting a whole other apartment if I plan on keeping you in my bed most nights anyways.”

She blushes at Sylvain’s easy joke about their sex lives. He’s always been better at shaking off expectations and pulling those kinds of lines than she has. Although, when she thinks about it, that was the reason they had moved out of the apartment they had originally shared with Felix after they’d gotten together. Walking in on them once had been more than enough for Felix’s poor eyes. 

“Hey,” Sylvain urges, “if you’re not comfortable with that you don’t have to. Maybe see if Dorothea wants a more permanent roommate for a couple of months and we go from there, okay?”

Ingrid relaxes. It is a fair point. She’s been living with Dorothea for almost a month now anyways and her friend seems happy to have her around. 

“I’m going to go back to Daphnel,” Ingrid says next.

Sylvain’s eyes widen and she realizes how poorly she had worded the phrase. She holds her hands up and quickly backtracks. 

“Just for a few days! Dimitri’s birthday is in four days and I will definitely be back for it. I just need to get some things out of my apartment and call my landlord and deal with my job and everything,” she assures. 

Sylvain slumps, relaxing. “Jeez, Ingrid, you’re going to give me a heart attack this morning.”

She laughs and leans across the gap between their stools so that their knees bump together. She braces her hands on Sylvain’s knees and pecks him on the lips. 

“Sorry.”

He rolls his eyes at her but kisses her again. “What do you need from Daphnel? Can I come help?”

She shakes her head. “You’re working tomorrow, right? I think I’ll just take the train there and I’ll be back in two days? That way we still have time to figure out how we’re going to tell our friends that we’re,” she trails off awkwardly before she can say _back together_. 

Sylvain, because he knows her better than anyone else, picks up on her hesitation. “Ingrid Brandl Galatea,” he begins dramatically, and she huffs, leaning away from him, but he continues, undeterred, “would you do me the greatest honour by accepting my humble pleas and admission of adoration by becoming my girlfriend again?”

She softens, amused by his theatrics. “I think I can manage that if you’re still interested in being my boyfriend.”

“Interested? Are there other parties I need to contend with?” He gasps, faking offended. “And here I thought you had confessed your undying love to me.”

Ingrid shoves him. “Undying? Don’t get ahead of yourself, mister.”

“Mm,” Sylvain hums, standing off his chair and leaning down to kiss her cheek and then up the side of her face to her ear. “Maybe that was the undying love of a specific thing I can do with my tongue.”

Ingrid shrieks and shoves him away from her. 

* * *

It’s strange to watch the weather get less and less winter-like the further she gets from Fhirdiad. The train to Daphnel is four hours each way and it winds through the lower part of the Oghma Mountains. The snow layer on the ground lessens until there are just a couple of patches here and there. 

For the most part of the train ride, Ingrid reads up on GMU’s education Master’s program and texts with Sylvain. Apparently he’s going for drinks with the boys that night and Ingrid asks him to hold off on telling anyone that they’d gotten back together until she gets back. Sylvain whines about it, but he does agree to keep his trap shut. 

Ingrid can’t say that she does the same. Dorothea sent her many text messages the night before asking where she was, what she was doing, and if she was sleeping with Sylvain again. Ingrid considers replying with a text, but then she decides against it. She had stopped by the apartment to grab a few things for her trip back to Daphnel, but Dorothea hadn’t been home. 

She calls her on the second hour of the train ride. 

“ _Ingrid, darling, how’s Sylvain’s dick?_ ” Dorothea greets brightly. 

Ingrid flushes even though she’s wearing headphones and is definitely the only person on the train that can hear her friend. “Please, don’t ever ask me that again.”

Dorothea laughs. “ _Damn, you did sleep with him again! Ingrid, honey, when are you going to figure out that sleeping with your ex is generally a bad idea. Whatever magic trick Gautier does in the sheets cannot be enough to combat the awkwardness that must be present the next morning."_

Ingrid huffs. “What if there’s no awkwardness?” she asks. 

Dorothea pauses. “ _Oh shit!_ ” she exclaims. “ _Did you guys finally fucking talk_?”

“Yes,” Ingrid agrees. “We talked. I think,” she pauses, fiddling with her sweater and smiling to herself, “that we’re going to be okay.”

“ _Y_ _ou got back together with him_ ,” Dorothea extrapolates. “ _Wow, I can honestly say this was not what I was expecting out of this phone call. Do I need to beat his ass? Did he really apologize for all of the bullshit?_ ”

“We did our equal share of apologies and I’m sure this train ride will give me the chance to think of a few more that I owe him,” Ingrid explains. 

“ _Train?_ ”

“I’m going back to Daphnel for a few days to pick up some stuff and talk to Judith again.”

“ _What’s your plan when you get back? Because you’re definitely one-hundred percent welcome to keep staying with me for as long as you need. I can even get your name on the lease to make it official. Though_ ,” she pauses, sounding smug, “ _if_ _Sylvain’s anything like he was back then, I’m sure you’ll be spending most of your nights hearing your own screams echo off his walls._ ”

“Dorothea!” she snaps, feeling her face flush further. “But, if that’s really okay, I would love to be your roommate for a while.”

“ _Just don’t make it long term,_ ” Dorothea suggests. “ _I want to see you two get your shit back together as much as anyone does._ ”

Ingrid smiles as she watches the mountainside zip by the train window. “Yeah, me too."

* * *

Everything goes surprisingly well back in Daphnel. Her landlord asks her to continue to pay out her lease, which is fine, and Judith takes her out for a drink and gives her a glowing reference letter. She and Sylvain call each other both nights and talk until it’s almost two in the morning. 

She’s on the platform waiting for her train when her phone rings. Ingrid rolls her eyes, expecting Sylvain just to be saying that he can’t wait to see her in a few hours, because he’s like that, but the caller ID makes her pause. 

It’s not Sylvain, it’s Felix. 

“Felix?”

“ _Ingrid, where are you?_ ”

“I’m in Daphnel. My train leaves in half an hour, so I’ll be back in Fhirdiad this evening,” she replies. 

Felix’s voice sounds curt and almost panicked. Dread curls heavily in her stomach. 

“Felix, what happened?” she asks. 

“ _Dimitri,_ ” Felix says shortly and Ingrid’s breath catches. 

“Did he?” she asks faintly, trailing off. 

“ _Yes. He broke a window in their living room and Byleth called back up. Sylvain was the closest and he got there ten minutes before Dedue and I did._ ”

“Oh god,” Ingrid breathes in horror. “Is he okay?”

Felix’s hesitation scares the shit out of her. “ _I’ll pick you up from the station, alright? He’s,_ ” there’s a heavy pause, “ _okay for now._ ”

The call goes dead and Ingrid can’t stop the tremor in her hands from sending her phone crashing to the ground on the train platform.


	17. track 17: tell me what are my words worth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Ingrid,” Dimitri starts. “I’m so, so sorry. I don’t know what happened. Everything was dark and then the next thing I knew Sylvain was there and,” he cuts himself off, getting choked up._
> 
> _Ingrid wraps her arms around him and pulls him into a fierce hug. “Shut up, Dimitri,” she says firmly._
> 
> \- The End.

_ track 17: tell me what my words are worth  _

* * *

_ present _

* * *

Ingrid socks Felix the moment she sees him. He catches her second attempt at punching him and just pulls her into a hug. She is tense against him for a moment, unable to let go of all the adrenaline that has been making her a nervous wreck for the last several hours. 

Finally, she leans her head on her friend’s shoulder and exhales shakily. 

“Is he okay?”

“They’re both okay,” Felix promises. 

Ingrid takes a deep breath in and holds it for a few seconds before she exhales until she has no air left in her lungs. “Where are they?”

“I think everyone’s still at the hospital being a nuisance for the hospital staff. I drove here, let’s go.”

Ingrid drags her suitcase behind her to Felix’s car, her mind still worrying. She didn’t know what Dimitri had been like over the last five years. She could only think about how relaxed and at ease he had seen when she had seen him recently. Still, the kind of trauma he underwent doesn’t go anywhere and she knows how he had used to handle it. 

She fidgets in the passenger seat next to Felix the whole way to the hospital, playing with the hem of her coat or turning her phone over in her hands as if it will magically ring with good news like this is all some practical joke. 

It doesn’t. 

Felix parks in guest parking and Ingrid leaves all her stuff in the car as they hurry into the hospital. According to a text from Byleth, they’re on the fourth floor now, out of Emergency. There is a small group of people gathered in front of the elevators so Felix and Ingrid redirect to the stairs without a word. 

They follow the signs for the room number Byleth had given them and they see a group of people clustered outside the room. Annette spots them first and she runs towards them, ignoring the dirty look she gets from the nurse. She throws her arms around Felix, pulling him into a tight hug and then a brief kiss before she leans away and hugs Ingrid tightly. 

Ingrid feels numb as she blindly pats Annette on the back. She’s staring down the hall at the chairs outside the hospital room. Mercedes is sitting down, wearing scrubs, and looking dead on her feet. Dedue is standing next to her. Dimitri is sitting in the other chair and Ingrid can’t help but fixate on the bandages wrapped around her hands. Byleth is leaning on his chair, running her hands through her fiancé’s hair in comfort. 

The group notices hers and Felix’s arrival once Annette reaches them and Ingrid watches a panicked look flash through Dimitri’s eyes. He stands up as she approaches and Ingrid’s chest tightens. 

“Ingrid,” Dimitri starts. “I’m so, so sorry. I don’t know what happened. Everything was dark and then the next thing I knew Sylvain was there and,” he cuts himself off, getting choked up. 

Ingrid wraps her arms around him and pulls him into a fierce hug. “Shut up, Dimitri,” she says firmly. 

Dimitri doesn’t hug her back because he’s too startled. She leans back and gives him her best scolding look. It’s one that had been perfected and crafted on Sylvain over many, many years. 

“You’re not in control when that happens, we know that. Sylvain knew what he was doing when he answered Byleth’s SOS. We all know what we’re doing when we answer that kind of call, alright? He probably should have waited for backup, but he didn’t and we’re here now.”

Dimitri relaxes a bit like someone had just poked a hole in a balloon. He deflates back into the chair he was in and Byleth kisses the top of his head when he sits down again. She gives Ingrid a grateful look and Ingrid nods. She has known Dimitri for a long time. There were times when she would have answered the call that Sylvain answered herself too. 

Her eyes dart to the hospital room door nervously. Mercedes reaches up and pats her arm reassuringly. 

“He’s okay,” she promises. “I know the doctors who looked after him. He’ll be fine.”

Felix scoffs. “Oh he’s going to whine like a bitch for weeks about this, but he’ll be fine.”

Ingrid laughs despite herself. Somehow, she still can’t make herself enter the room. Maybe it’s the awkwardness of the hallway situation since she and Sylvain have technically not told anyone they’re back together and yet she’s here and everyone seems to already know that they’re dating again. 

“You know,” Byleth says, “we all had it figured out by the time you guys came to game night.”

Ingrid blinks. “What?”

“Sylvain’s never gotten over you,” Dedue says quietly. “I don’t even think he ever really tried.”

Annette taps Ingrid’s elbow lightly. “And you told me that you still loved him so it wasn’t hard to put together.”

“Especially when you decided to stick around,” Mercedes finishes. 

Ingrid blushes, but she just reaches for the door handle, finally having gathered her courage. She pauses to look back at her friends. 

“Thank you for looking after him.” The ‘ _ when I didn’t _ ’ part of the sentence goes unsaid, but it’s understood. 

She opens the door and slips into the room. Sylvain is lying in a hospital bed with his arm in a sling across his body. He looks like he’s asleep, so Ingrid creeps over to stand over his bed. He has the sling and a long, ugly-looking cut that starts on his forehead and goes up into his hair. It looks like it has been sewn shut with stitches. Ingrid presses her lips together and lightly touches Sylvain’s arm. 

His eyes flicker open slowly and he blinks at her. “Ingrid?”

“Hey,” she says quietly. She sits on the edge of the bed and touches his cheek with the faintest touch she can manage. 

“I gotta stop doing this to you,” Sylvain says. He tries to smile about it, but Ingrid frowns and his own smile slips. 

“Thank you, Sylvain,” she says. “Dimitri and Byleth needed you.”

He chuckles. “Hey, Dimitri’s my friend too. I never want to see him like that again, but at least Felix and Dedue and I have lots of practice taking him down.”

Ingrid’s eyes settle on his sling, unable to look him in the face. “What happened to your arm?”

“Dislocated shoulder,” Sylvain explains. “Mercedes reset it before we even got to the hospital. This whole schtick is mostly because of the stitches.”

Ingrid nods slowly. “You’re okay?” she asks. 

Sylvain’s good hand lifts off the sheets and he takes one of her hands. “My girlfriend is here, my friends are outside, and my friend came out of his PTSD break without much trouble. Yeah, I’m good.”

Ingrid leans forward and kisses him on the forehead, missing his stitches intentionally. “I love you, Sylvain.”

“Aw, I mean I already knew that, but it’s nice to hear.”

She rolls her eyes and is about to lean back when Sylvain’s hand slides up to her elbow and he keeps her pulled down towards him so that he can awkwardly lean up and kiss her on the lips. 

“I love you too,” he says. 

Ingrid gently pushes him down against the sheets. “Stay down, for your own sake.”

Sylvain laughs. “Not the kind of bed I like you shoving me into I’m afraid.”

She claps a hand over his mouth and tries to smother her own laugh. “Shut up.”

She withdraws her hand after a second and goes back to holding his hand. Sylvain’s thumb skims over the back of her hand every now and then and it sends tingles up her whole arm whenever he does. 

“Everyone knows,” she says.

“Darn,” Sylvain mutters sarcastically. “And here I was hoping I’d be able to propose to you before anyone found out.”

Ingrid stares at him. “What?”

He smiles. “Not yet, don’t worry. We still have plenty of stuff to talk about and a lot of dates to catch up on, but if that’s okay with you, Ing, it’s something I would really like to look forward to getting to do that someday.”

Ingrid knows her cheeks are warm, but she squeezes Sylvain’s hand. “I’d like that,” she replies. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to the Sylvgrid discord for encouraging, yelling, and just freaking out over this fic to keep me motivated. 
> 
> I have no idea how I kept the one-chapter-a-day posting streak going and I'm never, ever going to attempt this again. Special thanks to Liv for freaking out with me over this album enough to keep it going and motivating me to start the fic when I started brainstorming it. Thanks to Mish for getting into a posting war with me to continue that one a day streak, that was incredibly motivating. Thanks to Emi, Sunni, and Jul and everyone else for your kind (and not so kind, but like fair, words)
> 
> Here's to whatever the fuck this fic evolved into. Join us in the Sylvgrid Discord server (https://discord.gg/aRcXgvt) if you liked this fic and you want to know more about all the things I nearly included or how it very nearly ended.


End file.
